Systems Engineer, DNS

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.

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.