✨ AI Summary
We are seeking a Senior Core Infrastructure Engineer to join our DNS Data Plane team. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, building, and operating high-performance, highly reliable DNS services that power critical infrastructure at a global scale. The focus is on performance-sensitive systems, distributed networking, and operational excellence, balancing correctness, latency, and resiliency.
Key responsibilities include designing and implementing DNS data plane components, building services in Go, C, Java, and/or Python, and optimizing performance across CPU, memory, and network I/O. You will own data plane components end-to-end, including architecture, implementation, testing, rollout, observability, and capacity planning. Collaboration with control plane, security, SRE, and operations teams is crucial for delivering end-to-end DNS platform improvements. The role also involves providing technical leadership, mentoring teammates, and raising engineering standards.
🎁 Benefits & Perks
Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion; Short term and long term disability; Life insurance and AD&D; Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child); Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts; Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits; 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match; Paid time off: Flexible Vacation (13-18 days annually); 11 paid holidays; Paid sick leave (72 hours upon hire, up to 112 hours carryover); Paid parental leave; Adoption assistance; Employee Stock Purchase Plan; Financial planning and group legal; Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance. May be eligible for bonus and equity.
Requirements
Requires at least 5 years of operations engineering experience in SaaS, cloud, or hybrid-cloud environments, with 5+ years managing large-scale distributed service infrastructure and 3+ years of hands-on Linux experience. Must have strong experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems and/or network services, and proficiency in Go, C, Java, or Python. Solid understanding of Linux systems, networking fundamentals, concurrency, and performance profiling is essential, along with demonstrated experience designing highly available systems and safe production rollouts.
Description
We’re seeking a Senior Core Infrastructure Engineer to join our DNS Data Plane team. You’ll design, build, and operate high-performance, highly reliable DNS services that power critical infrastructure at global scale. This role focuses on performance-sensitive systems, distributed networking, and operational excellence—balancing correctness, latency, and resiliency.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and implement DNS data plane components across authoritative and recursive request paths, with a focus on low-latency, high-throughput processing.
- Build services and libraries in Go, C, Java, and/or Python, selecting the right language and approach for each component’s performance and operational needs.
- Optimize CPU, memory, and network I/O performance through efficient event loops, concurrency models, socket tuning, and profiling.
- Own data plane components end to end: architecture, implementation, testing, safe rollout, observability, capacity planning, and ongoing operational health.
- Develop and maintain metrics, logs, tracing, SLOs, dashboards, 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.
- Participate in code reviews, architecture reviews, and technical leadership; mentor teammates and raise engineering standards.
- Take ownership of production outcomes by proactively identifying and driving performance, reliability, security, and operational improvements.
Required Qualifications
- At least 5 years of operations engineering experience in SaaS, cloud, or hybrid-cloud environments.
- 5+ years managing and operating large-scale, highly distributed service infrastructure.
- At least 3 years of hands-on Linux experience.
- Strong experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems and/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—including TCP/UDP and sockets—concurrency, and performance profiling.
- Demonstrated experience designing highly available systems and delivering safe production rollouts using practices such as canaries and feature flags.
- Strong ownership mindset, with the ability to make sound technical decisions, navigate ambiguity, and drive complex problems through to durable resolution.
Desired Skills / Nice to Have
- Deep DNS knowledge, including relevant RFCs, UDP/TCP DNS, 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 protection, and traffic engineering for L4/L7 services.
- Experience with containers and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, including service meshes and network policies where relevant.
- Infrastructure-as-code experience, especially Terraform.
- Strong testing discipline, including unit and integration testing, fuzzing, property-based testing, and chaos testing.
- Experience operating mission-critical, 24/7 services.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools thoughtfully to accelerate coding, testing, debugging, and documentation while applying 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, following through from initial design to long-term production health.
- You evolve the DNS platform with clean architecture, strong operational readiness, and secure-by-design practices.
- You identify risks and opportunities early, driving pragmatic improvements beyond the immediate task.
- You raise team standards through mentorship, thoughtful technical leadership, and a culture of operational excellence.