Staff Software Engineer — Networking & DNS Infrastructure

BlueCat; Toronto; On-site; CAD 160,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Professional development budget

Wellness days

Lifestyle spending account

Employee recognition program

Job summary

BlueCat is seeking a systems engineer to design and operate high-throughput, low-latency network infrastructure written in Rust. You’ll work on the core data plane of a production DNS platform, translating customer problems into practical engineering solutions while staying close to users and product teams.

The role emphasizes reliability, observability, and performance within a fast-growing, collaborative environment. A strong focus on testing and quality ensures robust, scalable systems.

Qualifications

• Strong systems programming experience in Rust with async programming (Tokio).
• Solid grasp of networking fundamentals: TCP/UDP, TLS, HTTP, DNS or similar wire protocols.
• Experience writing performance-sensitive concurrent code with benchmarking and profiling.
• A test-first, correctness-oriented mindset with attention to edge cases and graceful shutdown.
• Comfort navigating a large workspace with crates/modules, shared libraries, and CI.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement components of a high-performance DNS engine (resolvers, forwarders, caches, pipelines).
• Implement and harden DNS protocol features (UDP/TCP, DoH, DoT, DNSSEC, ECS).
• Build features for traffic management and reliability (load balancing, health checks, policy evaluation).
• Profile, optimize memory use and data structures; optimize hot paths with benchmarks.
• Integrate data plane with control-plane services and configuration updates.

Skills

Rust

Tokio async

Networking basics

Concurrent programming

Test-driven mindset

CI/CD

Communication

Customer empathy

Job description

We're BlueCat—a Great Place to Work for good reason. Our team solves critical network challenges for some of the world's largest organizations. In simple terms, we manage the systems that keep networks running smoothly, securely, and reliably—the backbone infrastructure that powers digital transformation for enterprises globally. Our Intelligent Network Operations platform delivers and enables AI-driven agentic ops at scale, automating and simplifying how companies manage, secure, and optimize their networks.

But what makes us different is how we work: we believe great work happens in an environment where you're trusted, heard, and supported. With teams globally, we're building a workplace culture that values collaboration and integrity as much as innovation. If you're looking to advance your career with a company that invests in its people, this is it.

About the role:

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.

What you'll do:

• 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).

Working with customers and product

• 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.

What we're looking for:

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

Nice to have:

• 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.

Impact:

Your 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.

$160,000 - $180,000 a year

The annual salary range for this position is 160.000 – 180.000 CAD, plus participation in a discretionary bonus plan. Final compensation will be determined based on skills, experience, and qualifications.

The role is for an existing vacancy.

If you share our enthusiasm for the future of our company and are eager to contribute to our vibrant workplace, Our comprehensive benefits encompass your health, financial well-being, and overall wellness, and we are committed to providing an exceptional work environment, enriching employee programs, and fostering a remarkable company culture. At our core, we champion values such as transparency, curiosity, respect, and above all, the pursuit of enjoyment.

• A Professional Development Budget
• Dedicated Wellness Days and Wellness Week
• A Lifestyle Spending Account
• An Employee Recognition Program

Join us in shaping the future of our organization, where your talent and dedication can truly thrive.

BlueCat is an Equal Opportunity Employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We also take affirmative action to offer employment and advancement opportunities to all applicants, including minorities, women, protected veterans, and individuals with disabilities. BlueCat will not discriminate or retaliate against applicants who inquire about, disclose, or discuss their compensation or that of other applicants.