The Senior Systems Engineer, AI Gateway role at Cloudflare is a hands-on individual contributor position based in Austin, TX or San Francisco, CA. This position suits an experienced systems builder excited to design and scale the edge infrastructure powering next-generation artificial intelligence applications.
Role Overview
Cloudflare is looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to help build AI Gateway, a network-edge layer that provides reliable, observable, secure, and cost-controlled access to multiple AI models and providers. This is a deeply hands-on role working across distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, developer workflows, dashboards, SDKs, and documentation. The engineer will turn ambiguous technical concepts into production-ready systems quickly while utilizing AI-native tools and automation to optimize the engineering loop.
Key Responsibilities
Build core AI Gateway systems capable of handling high-volume inference traffic across multiple providers, models, and Cloudflare’s global network.
Design and implement APIs, routing primitives, observability features, controls, and developer workflows for easy AI Gateway adoption.
Collaborate across product and infrastructure boundaries with Workers AI, Agents, and the Developer Platform organization to create a unified platform.
Transform ambiguous product and technical ideas into functional prototypes, design documents, shipped features, and production improvements.
Enhance reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and debuggability for latency-sensitive artificial intelligence workloads.
Build internal tools, agents, tests, harnesses, evaluation loops, and context to help the team ship faster with confidence.
Focus heavily on developer experience, including error messages, SDKs, dashboard flows, documentation, examples, and API details.
Mentor other engineers through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, and technical guidance.
Requirements
5+ years of experience building and operating production systems in AI infrastructure, developer platforms, cloud infrastructure, edge or proxy systems, high-scale APIs, or distributed systems.
Strong systems engineering fundamentals covering networking, APIs, reliability, observability, data modeling, performance, and operational tradeoffs.
Experience designing or scaling distributed systems where latency, throughput, availability, and correctness are critical.
Comfort working 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 with past experience using and building APIs, SDKs, dashboards, CLIs, and documentation.
Clear technical communication skills for writing design docs, explaining tradeoffs, reviewing architecture, and aligning technical and product partners.
A builder’s bias toward working software, rapid prototyping, incremental shipping, and continuous production improvement.
Operational judgment suited for Cloudflare scale, building observable, resilient, and recoverable systems.
Comfort using AI-native development workflows and automation to improve engineering productivity.
Nice to Have
Experience building AI/ML infrastructure, inference platforms, model gateways, LLM-powered applications, or provider abstraction layers.
Background in 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 artificial intelligence ecosystem, including model providers, model capabilities, agent frameworks, inference patterns, and common developer challenges.
Experience managing cost controls, rate limits, caching, retries, fallbacks, evaluation, or observability for artificial intelligence workloads.
Proficiency with TypeScript, Go, Rust, or similar systems and backend languages.
Experience building or customizing agentic development environments, custom agents, harnesses, or tools.
Prior use of AI Gateway, Workers AI, or competing products with informed opinions on missing features.
A track record of writing publicly about developer tools, infrastructure, systems, or artificial intelligence products.
Skills and Tools
TypeScript
Rust
LLM
Distributed Systems
High-Throughput APIs
Edge and Proxy Systems
Salary and Benefits
Estimated annual salary of $194,000 to $266,000 for Bay Area based hires, with compensation adjusted based on work location.
Eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
Comprehensive health and welfare benefits including medical, prescription, dental, vision, flexible spending accounts, commuter spending, fertility, and family forming benefits.
On-demand mental health support, employee assistance program, and global travel medical insurance.
Financial security benefits including short and long-term disability, life and accident insurance, 401(k) retirement savings plan, and employee stock participation plan.
Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave, alongside leave programs including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave.
About the Company
Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest networks, powering millions of Internet properties by protecting and accelerating applications without adding hardware, software, or code changes. Recognized for its top company culture and innovative edge, Cloudflare maintains a mission to help build a better Internet. The company supports initiatives like Project Galileo, which protects journalism and civil society organizations from cyber attacks, and the Athenian Project, which secures state and local government election websites. Cloudflare also operates the privacy-focused 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver.
How to Apply
Candidates should apply directly on the official Cloudflare careers page to submit their application for this position.
