Systems Engineer, DNS

Available Locations: Austin, TX

About the DNS team

Cloudflare runs one of the largest DNS infrastructures in the world. We provide authoritative DNS for millions of Internet properties and operate 1.1.1.1, a public recursive resolver. Aggregated our authoritative DNS and resolver platforms handle around 3 trillion DNS queries per day.

Our DNS systems are custom built internally, so we’ve developed a lot of proprietary technology that operates at scale, iterating constantly to meet new scaling and reliability requirements. The work spans protocol implementation, distributed systems, performance, reliability, and the operational tooling behind them.

Our team builds and operates both services, plus the systems that publish records, distribute changes, and serve queries across Cloudflare's global network.

About the role

As a Systems Engineer on the DNS team at Cloudflare, you will be a key contributor to one of the core systems that help build a better Internet. You will take ownership of medium-to-large projects, driving them from initial design to successful completion with some supervision.

In this role, you will act as a natural point of contact for your projects, mentor junior engineers, and help improve the resilience and architecture of our systems. We are looking for an engineer who can solve complex issues with minimal help and contribute to shaping features and processes within a talented, collaborative team.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and expand our DNS infrastructure, implementing features for our customers.
• Write high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code that simplifies and improves our systems
• Act as a subject matter expert for moderately complex systems, becoming a go-to person for questions about the projects you work on.
• Proactively identify issues affecting the team and propose effective solutions to improve our processes and technology.
• Collaborate with Product and other stakeholders to provide meaningful input on product requirement documents (PRDs).
• Serve as a mentor and onboarding guide for junior team members, helping them grow through thoughtful code and design reviews.
• Debug and resolve complex service issues with minimal assistance, improving system resilience through refactoring and re-architecting.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience:

• BA/BS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong systems programming fundamentals, including performance, concurrency, and networking.
• Ability to write production code in Rust or Go, or a track record of learning a comparable language quickly.
• A habit of measuring before optimizing and reasoning about failure modes.
• Willingness to own changes beyond the code: rollout, monitoring, on-call, and follow-up.
• DNS experience is welcome, not required.
• Ability to drive projects to completion and scope work effectively for yourself and other team members.

Bonus Points

• Experience running established team meetings or technical discussions.
• Contributions to technical documentation or talks that guide your team or organization.
• Experience interviewing and providing meaningful feedback on technical candidates.
• Familiarity with building services in a large-scale, high-performance environment.
• Open source contributions is a big bonus
• Knowledge of DNSSEC and various security extensions to DNS
• Knowledge of HTTP, TLS and CDN Networks

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law.