Edge Caching Architecture at Cloudflare
Cloudflare edge locations route incoming traffic through a distributed caching mesh built on Pingora. Fast NVMe drives store warm ranges. Memory pools buffer hot response segments while tiered NVMe solid-state drives hold warmed byte ranges. Instead of blocking POSIX disk calls, async worker threads dispatch zero-copy read buffers directly into socket descriptors via io_uring. This saves CPU. A consistent hashing ring coordinates object placement across server nodes in the same data center. Cache index mutations rely on lock-free radix trees, preventing allocation pauses when billions of tiny static assets expire simultaneously. Latency stays flat. You will write Rust services managing RFC 9111 HTTP cache compliance, tiered revalidation, and origin connection collapse.
This role sits on the Cache Core engineering team. Base compensation spans $194,000 to $266,000 USD alongside equity and health benefits.
Core Production Responsibilities
- Build async proxy modules inside Pingora handling multi-gigabit ingress and egress pipelines.
- Profile Linux page cache behavior, kernel slab usage, and NVMe block device queue depths.
- Design lock-free in-memory cache lookup structures supporting millions of queries per second per host.
- Implement origin shielding mechanisms that collapse duplicate concurrent misses into single upstream fetches.
Technical Background
- Solid production experience in Rust or modern C++ operating low-latency distributed networks.
- Deep understanding of Linux systems programming, socket options, TCP/HTTP protocols, and asynchronous runtimes.
- Familiarity with non-blocking IO abstractions such as epoll, kqueue, or io_uring.
- Disclosed base salary: $194,000 to $266,000 USD plus equity.
