Own the metadata layer behind every R2 storage operation at global scale

Build and operate the distributed-SQL-backed metadata system that serves every put, get, list, and delete for Cloudflare's R2 object storage. This is a senior IC role on Cloudflare's Emerging Technologies & Incubation team, going deep on schema design, S3 API compatibility, and Workers/Kubernetes production operations for a system managing billions of objects.

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What this interview tests

Distributed SQL schema/data model design for a metadata layer
S3 API compatibility and correctness at billions-of-objects scale
Production operations on Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes
Oncall, incident response, and postmortem writing
Consistency vs. performance tradeoffs in distributed databases
AI-augmented daily engineering workflow

Common question themes

Design a metadata schema for an object-storage system serving S3-compatible operations at scale

Tradeoffs between consistency, durability, and performance when choosing an index or query pattern

Tell me about a production incident you owned end-to-end, including the postmortem

How you'd coordinate a cross-cutting schema change across teams (storage infra, networking, platform)

How you use AI tools in day-to-day development and debugging

How candidates describe it

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