Who you are

- Strong systems programming experience in Rust, including async programming with tokio

- Solid grasp of networking fundamentals: TCP/UDP, TLS, HTTP, and ideally DNS or another wire protocol

- Experience writing performance-sensitive concurrent code, and the instinct to measure before and after with benchmarks and profiling
- A test-first, correctness-oriented mindset — you care about edge cases, graceful shutdown, backpressure, and deterministic behavior under concurrency

- Comfort working across a large workspace: crates/modules, shared libraries, plugin boundaries, and CI

- Robust communication skills and genuine customer empathy: you can talk to non-engineers, ask the right questions, and translate fuzzy problems into concrete engineering work

- Open source work in the Rust/tokio ecosystem a major plus

- DNS internals (record types, SOA/TTL handling, DNSSEC, ECS, dnstap)

- Prometheus metrics, tracing, and production observability practices

- Protobuf/gRPC, service discovery, and control-plane/data-plane architectures

- Allocator tuning (jemalloc/mimalloc), lock-free/atomic programming, and low-level performance work

- Experience upgrading language toolchains and managing dependency/security posture over time

- Experience working directly with customers or in a product-partnered engineering role

What the job involves

- 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

- Design and implement components of a high-performance DNS engine: resolvers, forwarders, caching layers, and request-processing pipelines

- Implement and harden DNS protocol features across transports: UDP/TCP, DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNSSEC, EDNS Client Subnet, and related standards

- Build features for traffic management and reliability: global server load balancing, health-checking, policy evaluation, response rewriting, and threat/security filtering

- Profile and optimize hot paths: memory allocation, data structures (tries, caches), connection pooling and multiplexing and back changes with benchmarks

- Integrate the data plane with control-plane services: configuration updates across distributed deployed nodes

- Own observability for your components: metrics, structured logging/tracing, and diagnostics that make production behavior legible

- Write thorough unit, integration, and component tests; keep the build green and the codebase clean (linting, formatting, dependency hygiene, security advisories)

- Listen directly to customers: through support escalations, field reports, and conversations to understand the problem behind the request, not just the feature they asked for

- Partner 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

- Reproduce and diagnose customer-reported issues in production traffic patterns, then design fixes that address the root cause rather than the symptom

📌 Staff Software Engineer (Toronto)
🏢 BlueCat
📍 Toronto