Role overview

BlueCat is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and operate high-performance DNS infrastructure on a production platform serving large-scale enterprise networks. The role focuses on building a Rust-based data plane that handles substantial query volumes with strict latency requirements and strong reliability guarantees. You will work on systems that form the backbone of network operations for some of the world’s largest organizations.

Key responsibilities

Design and implement core components of a high-performance DNS engine, including resolvers, forwarders, caching layers, and request-processing pipelines.
Implement and strengthen DNS protocol features across multiple transports such as UDP/TCP, DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNSSEC, and EDNS Client Subnet.
Build traffic management and reliability features including global server load balancing, health-checking, policy evaluation, response rewriting, and security filtering.
Profile and optimize performance-critical code paths by analyzing memory allocation, data structures, connection pooling, and multiplexing, then validate improvements with benchmarks.
Integrate the data plane with control-plane services to ensure configuration updates propagate correctly across distributed nodes.
Establish comprehensive observability for your components through metrics, structured logging, tracing, and diagnostics.
Collaborate directly with customers to understand problems behind feature requests, work with product management to prioritize based on technical feasibility, and diagnose production issues by reproducing customer-reported patterns.

Requirements

Strong systems programming experience in Rust, including async programming with tokio.
Solid understanding of networking fundamentals including TCP/UDP, TLS, HTTP, and ideally DNS or other wire protocols.
Demonstrated experience writing performance-sensitive concurrent code with a disciplined approach to measurement through benchmarks and profiling.
Test-first, correctness-oriented mindset with attention to edge cases, graceful shutdown, backpressure, and deterministic behavior under concurrency.
Comfort working across large codebases with multiple crates, modules, shared libraries, and CI systems.
Strong communication skills and genuine ability to engage with non-technical stakeholders, ask clarifying questions, and translate ambiguous problems into concrete engineering work.

What makes this role worth considering

Your contributions directly impact the performance, resilience, and security of infrastructure sitting on the critical path for enterprise network requests. BlueCat emphasizes a collaborative workplace culture grounded in trust and integrity, with global teams and investment in employee development. The role maintains close customer contact, allowing you to see real-world impact from performance improvements and correctness fixes.