Senior Systems Engineer, AI Gateway

AVAILABLE LOCATIONS: AUSTIN, TX OR SAN FRANCISCO, CA

ABOUT THE ROLE

AI inference is becoming core infrastructure. Every serious application will need access to many models, across many providers, with reliability, observability, security, cost control, and routing built in from the start. AI Gateway is Cloudflare’s bet that this layer should exist at the network edge: close to users, close to compute, and simple enough that a developer can adopt it with one API change.

We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to help build that layer. This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor role for someone who can move from a half-formed product idea to a working, production-ready system quickly. You will work across the stack — from distributed systems and high-throughput APIs to developer-facing workflows, dashboards, SDKs, and docs — helping define how developers build and operate AI applications on Cloudflare.

You should be excited by the current pace of the AI ecosystem. Provider APIs change weekly, new models appear constantly, and developer expectations are rising just as quickly. AI Gateway needs engineers who can build durable infrastructure in that environment without slowing down.

We also believe AI should change how we build software, not just what we build. We dogfood AI Gateway, Workers AI, and Cloudflare’s broader agent stack heavily. You should be comfortable using AI-native tools, agents, harnesses, and automation to improve your own engineering loop — and interested in building the internal tools and context that help a small team ship like a much larger one.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Build core AI Gateway systems that handle high-volume inference traffic across providers, models, and Cloudflare’s global network.
• Design and implement APIs, routing primitives, observability features, controls, and developer workflows that make AI Gateway reliable and easy to adopt.
• Work across product and infrastructure boundaries with Workers AI, Agents, and the broader Developer Platform organization to make Cloudflare’s AI platform feel like one coherent product.
• Turn ambiguous product and technical ideas into prototypes, design docs, shipped features, and measurable production improvements.
• Improve reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and debuggability for latency-sensitive AI workloads.
• Build the software — and the software that builds the software: agents, tests, harnesses, evaluation loops, operational tools, and internal context that help the team move faster with confidence.
• Sweat the developer experience. Error messages, SDKs, dashboard flows, docs, examples, and API details all matter.
• Mentor other engineers through design review, code review, debugging, and technical leadership without needing people-management authority.
• Bring strong opinions, clear judgment, and a willingness to revise your view when data, users, or production reality prove otherwise.

DESIRABLE SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems, ideally in AI infrastructure, developer platforms, cloud infrastructure, edge/proxy systems, high-scale APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong systems engineering fundamentals: networking, APIs, reliability, observability, data modeling, performance, and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience designing or scaling distributed systems where latency, throughput, availability, and correctness all matter.
• Ability to work comfortably across the stack, from API design and product surfaces to backend services, queues, storage systems, control planes, or performance-critical code.
• Strong developer tools taste. You have used and built enough APIs, SDKs, dashboards, CLIs, docs, and internal platforms to know what makes them delightful or painful.
• Clear technical communication: you can write design docs, explain tradeoffs, review architecture, and align engineers and product partners around a practical path forward.
• A builder’s bias toward working software. You can prototype quickly, ship incrementally, and improve systems while they are already in production.
• Operational judgment. You understand that at Cloudflare scale, rare bugs are not rare for long, and you build systems that are observable, resilient, and recoverable.
• Comfort using AI-native development workflows and curiosity about how agents, tools, and automation can improve engineering productivity.

BONUS POINTS

• Experience building AI/ML infrastructure, inference platforms, model gateways, LLM-powered applications, or provider abstraction layers.
• Experience building developer-facing APIs, SDKs, CLIs, dashboards, or platform products at scale.
• Hands-on experience with proxy, edge, gateway, routing, or traffic management systems.
• Familiarity with the current AI ecosystem: model providers, model capabilities, agent frameworks, inference patterns, and the rough edges developers hit in practice.
• Experience with cost controls, rate limits, caching, retries, fallbacks, evaluation, or observability for AI workloads.
• Experience with TypeScript, Go, Rust, or similar systems/backend languages.
• You have built or heavily customized your own agentic development environment: custom agents, harnesses, tools, or workflows that changed how you ship.
• You have built something with AI Gateway, Workers AI, or a competing product, and have opinions about what is missing.
• A track record of writing publicly about developer tools, infrastructure, systems, or AI products you have built.

COMPENSATION

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000-266,000

EQUITY

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

BENEFITS

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

HEALTH & WELFARE BENEFITS

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

FINANCIAL BENEFITS

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

TIME OFF

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave

WHAT MAKES CLOUDFLARE SPECIAL?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!

Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.