Principal Systems Engineer, Data

Available Locations: Austin
About the Team
The Core Data team's mission is building a centralized data platform for Cloudflare that provides secure, democratized access to data for internal customers throughout the company. We operate infrastructure and craft tools to empower both technical and non-technical users to answer their most important questions. We facilitate access to data from federated sources across the company for dashboarding, ad-hoc querying and in-product use cases. We power data pipelines and data products, secure and monitor data, and drive data governance at Cloudflare. Our work enables every individual at the company to act with greater information and make more informed decisions.
About the Role
We are looking for an experienced systems engineer with a deep expertise in data to help us expand, mature and maintain our data infrastructure. You'll lead technical architecture and implementation to scale our data platform, manage access seamlessly while accounting for privacy and security, create data pipelines and data products, and build tools to automate accessibility and usefulness of data. You'll work with teams including Product Growth, Marketing and others to help those teams make informed decisions, the Billing team to power usage and invoicing platforms, as well as product teams across the company bringing new and innovative solutions to Cloudflare customers using our internal data.
What You'll Do

• Define, design and execute strategic technical architecture for highly visible, highly critical data infrastructure at the company.
• Lead the design and development tools and infrastructure to improve and scale our data infrastructure at Cloudflare.
• Lead the design and development of data pipelines and data products to serve customers throughout the company, including tools to automate delivery of those services.
• Become a subject matter expert across both our data platforms, tools and infrastructures as well as our data itself to guide and enable stakeholders with data needs.
• Work across our tech stack, which includes Kubernetes, Trino, Iceberg, Clickhouse, and PostgreSQL, with software built using Go, Javascript/Typescript, Python, and others.
• Mentor and support junior engineers on the team, reinforcing a culture of exceptional delivery and accountability on the team.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer with a focus on designing, building and scaling data infrastructure
• Proven experience leading technical initiatives in a cross-functional context, working with multiple stakeholders and driving value delivery.
• Extensive experience with data infrastructure at scale, including tools like Trino, Spark, Iceberg/Delta Lake, Kafka, Clickhouse, PostgreSQL
• Background designing, building and debugging data pipelines at scale
• Proficient using backend languages like Go, Python, Typescript, and Rust, along with SQL
• Excellent analytical skills, with a focus on understanding data and how stakeholders use it to drive value
• Strong communication skills, especially around articulating technical concepts for technical and non-technical audiences

Desirable Skills

• Experience with data orchestration and infrastructure platforms like Airflow and DBT
• Experience deploying and managing infrastructure in Kubernetes
• Experience with data governance platforms and processes, with a focus on privacy and auditability
• Knowledge about machine learning models and MLOps