{"id":929017,"url":"https://alion.io/job/bluecat-networks-staff-software-engineer-networking-dns-infrastructure","title":"Staff Software Engineer — Networking & DNS Infrastructure","company":{"id":58109,"name":"BlueCat Networks","domain":"bluecatnetworks.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/bluecat-networks","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":39,"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Toronto, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":190000,"currency":"CAD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":135069},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"DNS","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":true},{"name":"C","optional":true},{"name":"gRPC","optional":true},{"name":"jemalloc","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-15T09:08:50Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-15","last_verified_at":"2026-11-10T23:22:41Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":56,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":56},"description":"About the role:\n We're looking for a systems engineer to build and operate high-throughput, low-latency network infrastructure written in Rust. You'll work on the core data plane of a production DNS platform. This service that handles large query volumes with tight latency budgets, strong reliability guarantees. It's also a role where you stay close to the people who use what you build, translating real customer problems into the right technical solution.\nWhat you'll do:\n\nDesign and implement components of a high-performance DNS engine: resolvers, forwarders, caching layers, and request-processing pipelines.\nImplement and harden DNS protocol features across transports: UDP/TCP, DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNSSEC, EDNS Client Subnet, and related standards.\nBuild features for traffic management and reliability: global server load balancing, health-checking, policy evaluation, response rewriting, and threat/security filtering.\nProfile and optimize hot paths: memory allocation, data structures (tries, caches), connection pooling and multiplexing and back changes with benchmarks.\nIntegrate the data plane with control-plane services: configuration updates across distributed deployed nodes.\nOwn observability for your components: metrics, structured logging/tracing, and diagnostics that make production behavior legible.\nWrite thorough unit, integration, and component tests; keep the build green and the codebase clean (linting, formatting, dependency hygiene, security advisories).\nWorking with customers and product\nListen directly to customers: through support escalations, field reports, and conversations to understand the problem behind the request, not just the feature they asked for.\nPartner 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 and where the real leverage is.\nReproduce and diagnose customer-reported issues in production traffic patterns, then design fixes that address the root cause rather than the symptom.\nWhat we're looking for:\n\nStrong systems programming experience in Rust, including async programming with tokio\nSolid grasp of networking fundamentals: TCP/UDP, TLS, HTTP, and ideally DNS or another wire protocol.\nExperience writing performance-sensitive concurrent code, and the instinct to measure before and after with benchmarks and profiling.\nA test-first, correctness-oriented mindset - you care about edge cases, graceful shutdown, backpressure, and deterministic behavior under concurrency.\nComfort working across a large workspace: crates/modules, shared libraries, plugin boundaries, and CI.\nStrong communication skills and genuine customer empathy: you can talk to non-engineers, ask the right questions, and translate fuzzy problems into concrete engineering work.\nNice to have:\n\nOpen source work in the Rust/tokio ecosystem a major plus\nDNS internals (record types, SOA/TTL handling, DNSSEC, ECS, dnstap).\nPrometheus metrics, tracing, and production observability practices.\nProtobuf/gRPC, service discovery, and control-plane/data-plane architectures.\nAllocator tuning (jemalloc/mimalloc), lock-free/atomic programming, and low-level performance work.\nExperience upgrading language toolchains and managing dependency/security posture over time.\nExperience working directly with customers or in a product-partnered engineering role.\nImpact:\n\nYour work directly affects the performance, resilience, and security of a service that sits on the critical path for every request that depends on it. Small improvements in latency, memory, or correctness matter at scale, and because you stay close to customers, you'll see those improvements land as real problems solved.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3730,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT Infrastructure & Networking Services","Network Security","DNS Services"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-15T10:10:42Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":40,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.734,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":55,"expected_fill_days":39,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":135069,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/bluecat-networks-staff-software-engineer-networking-dns-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/bluecat-networks-staff-software-engineer-networking-dns-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-11T02:42:11Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1121,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-12T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":58109},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=58109"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbluecat-networks-staff-software-engineer-networking-dns-infrastructure"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbluecat-networks-staff-software-engineer-networking-dns-infrastructure"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbluecat-networks-staff-software-engineer-networking-dns-infrastructure"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/bluecat-networks-staff-software-engineer-networking-dns-infrastructure\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbluecat-networks-staff-software-engineer-networking-dns-infrastructure"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":929017}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"bluecatnetworks.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":929017},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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