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Staff Software Engineer (Networking & DNS Infrastructure)

BlueCat

Skills

Required

  • Rust
  • tokio
  • programming
  • systems programming
  • async programming
  • writing performance-sensitive concurrent code
  • backpressure
  • Prometheus metrics

Preferred

  • DNS
  • networking
  • DNS engine
  • resolvers
  • forwarders
  • caching layers
  • request-processing pipelines
  • memory allocation
  • data structures
  • Protobuf / gRPC

Join our team as a Staff Software Engineer specializing in Networking & DNS Infrastructure. In this role, you will design and implement components of a high-performance DNS engine, optimize hot paths, and integrate the data plane with control-plane services. You will also own observability for your components, write thorough tests, and listen directly to customers to understand their needs. Strong experience in Rust and networking fundamentals is required.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement components of a high-performance DNS engine, including resolvers, forwarders, caching layers, and request-processing pipelines.
  • Profile and optimize hot paths in the code, focusing on memory allocation, data structures, connection pooling, and multiplexing.
  • Collaborate with product management to turn customer pain points into well-scoped features, and help shape the roadmap by grounding it in what's technically feasible.
  • Solid grasp of networking fundamentals: TCP/UDP, TLS, HTTP, and ideally DNS or another wire protocol
  • Comfort working across a large workspace: crates/modules, shared libraries, plugin boundaries, and CI
  • Protobuf/gRPC, service discovery, and control-plane/data-plane architectures

Requirements

  • Strong systems programming experience in Rust, including async programming with tokio
  • Strong communication skills and genuine customer empathy: you can talk to non-engineers, ask the right questions, and translate fuzzy problems into concrete engineering work
  • Experience writing performance-sensitive concurrent code, and the instinct to measure before and after with benchmarks and profiling
  • A test-first, correctness-oriented mindset — you care about edge cases, graceful shutdown, backpressure, and deterministic behavior under concurrency

Prometheus metrics, tracing, and production observability practices

  • Open source work in the Rust/tokio ecosystem a major plus
  • DNS internals (record types, SOA/TTL handling, DNSSEC, ECS, dnstap)
  • Experience upgrading language toolchains and managing dependency/security posture over time
  • Allocator tuning (jemalloc/mimalloc), lock-free/atomic programming, and low-level performance work
  • Experience working directly with customers or in a product-partnered engineering role