Senior Core Infrastructure Engineer
Job 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 . Design and implement DNS data plane components for low-latency, high-throughput request processing. Build and maintain core services/libraries in Go, C, Java, and/or Python. Drive performance optimization across CPU, memory, and network I/O (concurrency, socket tuning, event loops). Own observability and operational readiness: metrics/logs/tracing, SLOs, runbooks, and on-call practices. Improve reliability via fault-tolerant design, graceful degradation, and capacity planning. Partner cross-functionally (control plane, security, SRE/ops) to deliver end-to-end DNS platform improvements. Provide technical leadership through design reviews, code reviews, and mentoring.