Software Engineer, CDN Content
Vercel · San Francisco, United States · 2mo ago
About Vercel:
Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company, freeing people and agents to ship what's next. For more than a decade we've helped builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience.
Now we're scaling our products for both agents and people to ship and run software, built in the open and trusted by OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide.
About the Role:
The CDN Content team is responsible for serving all content that flows through Vercel's global CDN — static assets, optimized images, incrementally regenerated pages, partially prerendered shells, and everything in between — to billions of requests for millions of developers. Our focus is performance: ensuring content is served globally as fast as possible. Caching plays a big role in making that happen, and the team operates a multi-tier caching architecture spanning in-process caches, regional cache services, and object storage across 20+ regions.
As a Software Engineer on the team, you'll take on well-scoped projects with real production impact and grow into owning larger pieces of the system. The work spans the serving path end to end, and everything ships through careful, progressive rollouts validated with production data. You'll learn how a planet-scale CDN works from engineers who built it.
This is a team where infrastructure meets product: we work in close partnership with frameworks such as Next.js, bringing framework-defined infrastructure to life on Vercel's CDN, and the serving and caching behavior we ship directly shapes the performance and cost that millions of developers see. You'll develop strong instincts for distributed systems, careful production rollouts, and data-driven engineering.
If you're based within a pre-determined commuting distance of one of our offices (SF or NY), the role includes in-office anchor days on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. If you're located beyond that distance, the role is fully remote. For location-specific details, please connect with our recruiting team.
What You Will Do:
- Build and improve the services behind ISR, PPR, and image optimization — working in Go, Lua, and TypeScript across the serving path.
- Execute well-defined projects independently, from implementation through safe rollout (feature flags, shadow modes, progressive deployment) and post-ship validation.
- Monitor and maintain your work in production: build dashboards, add metrics and alerts, and develop ownership of what you ship.
- Contribute to the team's observability and testing surface — the dashboards, log views, and e2e test suites that keep a high-change system trustworthy.
- Participate in the on-call rotation with support from senior engineers, and contribute to incident follow-ups that make the system more resilient.
- Collaborate with teammates and partner teams (Next.js, CI/CD) through design discussions, code review, and pairing.
About You:
- 2+ years of experience building and operating backend services in production.
- Proficiency in at least one of Go, TypeScript/Node.js, or a comparable systems language, and enthusiasm for working across a polyglot stack.
- Solid understanding of HTTP and web fundamentals — caching headers, request/response lifecycle, what a proxy does.
- You write code you're willing to operate: tested, instrumented, and documented.
- Curious about how large-scale systems work, and motivated to dig into unfamiliar code and production data to figure things out.
- A collaborative teammate who communicates clearly, asks good questions, and follows through reliably.
Bonus If You:
- Have experience with caching systems (CDNs, Redis/Memcached, application-level caches) at any scale.
- Have AWS experience, particularly S3 or ElastiCache.
- Have used Next.js or another modern web framework and understand rendering modes like SSR/SSG/ISR.
- Have experience with observability tooling (Datadog, Honeycomb, or similar).
- Have experience with Terraform or Kubernetes.
Benefits:
- Competitive compensation package, including equity.
- Inclusive Healthcare Package.
- Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
- Flexible Time Off.
- We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.
The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $172,000 - $258,000. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location. The total compensation package may include benefits, equity-based compensation, and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.
Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.
Disclosures:
- Privacy: Please review our Job Applicant Privacy Policy for more information on how we handle your data.
- Equal Opportunity: Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.