Principal Software Engineer, Data

About the Role We are looking for an experienced, product-minded principal software engineer to help take Town Lake from a fast-growing internal platform into the foundational data infrastructure for the entire company. You’ll lead technical architecture and drive implementation for services across our whole stack, covering areas such as access control, an ingestion framework, AI-driven data classification, a semantic and governance layer, data product/ELT platform, a dashboarding and query tool, and more. We are an agentic first team: we leverage AI deeply and comprehensively to accelerate development and make things possible that wouldn’t be otherwise, and all our tools and services are agentic first for our users and the products they build on top of them. Town Lake is already used by dozens of teams across Cloudflare including Billing, Trust & Safety, Developer Platform, GTM and Support organizations. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role where you’ll work with critical teams across the company to solve real and interesting problems. 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 of 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 Experience 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 Experience creating and using agentic development workflows and an AI-first mentality 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 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 jo