We are seeking a Senior Core Infrastructure Engineer to join our DNS Data Plane team. You will design, build, and operate high-performance, highly reliable DNS services that power critical infrastructure at a global scale. This role focuses on performance-sensitive systems, distributed networking, and operational excellence, balancing correctness, latency, and resiliency.
Internal Responsibilities
- Design and implement DNS data plane components across authoritative and recursive request paths, emphasizing low-latency, high-throughput processing.
- Build services and libraries in Go, C, Java, or Python, selecting the appropriate language and approach for each component’s performance and operational requirements.
- Optimize CPU, memory, and network I/O through efficient event loops, concurrency models, socket tuning, profiling, and benchmarking.
- Own data plane components end to end, including architecture, implementation, testing, safe rollout, observability, capacity planning, and ongoing operational health.
- Develop and maintain metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, dashboards, alerts, and practical on-call playbooks.
- Improve reliability through fault-tolerant design, graceful degradation, safe deployment practices, and proactive capacity planning.
- Collaborate with control plane, security, SRE, and operations teams to deliver end-to-end DNS platform improvements.
- Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, and mentorship, raising engineering standards across the team.
- Take ownership of production outcomes by proactively identifying and driving performance, reliability, security, and operational improvements.
Required Qualifications
- 5-8+ years of experience building, managing, or operating large-scale distributed infrastructure in SaaS, cloud, or hybrid-cloud environments.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience with Linux operating systems.
- Strong experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems or network services.
- Proficiency in one or more of Go, C, Java, or Python, with the ability and interest to work across languages when needed.
- Solid understanding of Linux systems, networking fundamentals, TCP/UDP, sockets, concurrency, and performance profiling.
- Demonstrated experience designing highly available systems and delivering safe production rollouts using practices such as canaries, progressive deployments, and feature flags.
- Strong ownership and sound technical judgment, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and drive complex problems to durable resolution.
Desired Skills
- Deep DNS knowledge, including relevant RFCs, DNS over UDP and TCP, EDNS(0), DNSSEC, caching behavior, zone transfers, rate limiting, and load balancing.
- Experience with high-performance systems patterns such as epoll/kqueue, asynchronous I/O, low-lock or lock-free data structures, and packet processing.
- Familiarity with DDoS mitigation, abuse prevention, and traffic engineering for L4 and L7 services.
- Experience with containers and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, including service meshes and network policies where relevant.
- Infrastructure-as-code experience, particularly with Terraform.
- Strong testing discipline, including unit, integration, fuzz, property-based, performance, and chaos testing.
- Experience operating mission-critical, 24/7 services.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, testing, debugging, and documentation while maintaining strong engineering judgment, ownership, code quality, and security standards.
What Success Looks Like
- You deliver measurable improvements in latency, throughput, reliability, and operational efficiency.
- You take end-to-end ownership of the systems you build, from initial design through long-term production health.
- You evolve the DNS platform through clean architecture, strong operational readiness, and secure-by-design practices.
- You identify risks and opportunities early and drive pragmatic improvements beyond the immediate task.
- You raise team standards through mentorship, thoughtful technical leadership, and a culture of operational excellence.
External Responsibilities
- Design and implement DNS data plane components across authoritative and recursive request paths, emphasizing low-latency, high-throughput processing.
- Build services and libraries in Go, C, Java, or Python, selecting the appropriate language and approach for each component’s performance and operational requirements.
- Optimize CPU, memory, and network I/O through efficient event loops, concurrency models, socket tuning, profiling, and benchmarking.
- Own data plane components end to end, including architecture, implementation, testing, safe rollout, observability, capacity planning, and ongoing operational health.
- Develop and maintain metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, dashboards, alerts, and practical on-call playbooks.
- Improve reliability through fault-tolerant design, graceful degradation, safe deployment practices, and proactive capacity planning.
- Collaborate with control plane, security, SRE, and operations teams to deliver end-to-end DNS platform improvements.
- Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, and mentorship, raising engineering standards across the team.
- Take ownership of production outcomes by proactively identifying and driving performance, reliability, security, and operational improvements.
Required Qualifications
- 5-8+ years of experience building, managing, or operating large-scale distributed infrastructure in SaaS, cloud, or hybrid-cloud environments.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience with Linux operating systems.
- Strong experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems or network services.
- Proficiency in one or more of Go, C, Java, or Python, with the ability and interest to work across languages when needed.
- Solid understanding of Linux systems, networking fundamentals, TCP/UDP, sockets, concurrency, and performance profiling.
- Demonstrated experience designing highly available systems and delivering safe production rollouts using practices such as canaries, progressive deployments, and feature flags.
- Strong ownership and sound technical judgment, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and drive complex problems to durable resolution.
Desired Skills
- Deep DNS knowledge, including relevant RFCs, DNS over UDP and TCP, EDNS(0), DNSSEC, caching behavior, zone transfers, rate limiting, and load balancing.
- Experience with high-performance systems patterns such as epoll/kqueue, asynchronous I/O, low-lock or lock-free data structures, and packet processing.
- Familiarity with DDoS mitigation, abuse prevention, and traffic engineering for L4 and L7 services.
- Experience with containers and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, including service meshes and network policies where relevant.
- Infrastructure-as-code experience, particularly with Terraform.
- Strong testing discipline, including unit, integration, fuzz, property-based, performance, and chaos testing.
- Experience operating mission-critical, 24/7 services.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, testing, debugging, and documentation while maintaining strong engineering judgment, ownership, code quality, and security standards.
What Success Looks Like
- You deliver measurable improvements in latency, throughput, reliability, and operational efficiency.
- You take end-to-end ownership of the systems you build, from initial design through long-term production health.
- You evolve the DNS platform through clean architecture, strong operational readiness, and secure-by-design practices.
- You identify risks and opportunities early and drive pragmatic improvements beyond the immediate task.
- You raise team standards through mentorship, thoughtful technical leadership, and a culture of operational excellence.
