Director of Software Engineering, DNS Engineering

100 Salesforce, Inc.; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce, Inc. is seeking a Senior Manager of Software Engineering to lead DNS Engineering, owning DNS, DDI, and automation across data centers and Hyperforce. You will guide a multi-disciplinary team, set SLOs, and drive cloud-native migrations while ensuring security and high availability.

You will partner with platform, networking, and product teams to deliver a scalable, resilient DNS platform and mentor future leaders in a complex, globally distributed environment.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years leading teams.
• Deep DNS and core internet protocols knowledge at scale.
• Experience owning Tier-0/Tier-1 services in a 24x7x365 environment.
• Proven distributed systems design and reliability judgment.
• Public cloud experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tooling.
• Ability to drive AI-assisted automation and developer productivity.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term strategy and roadmap for DNS/DDI and lead delivery.
• Grow and mentor engineering teams, with diverse, high-performing talent.
• Ensure availability, latency, and change-safety targets (SLOs).
• Modernize platform to cloud-native, multi-provider DNS across Hyperforce.
• Automate with AI-assisted development and self-service APIs.
• Collaborate with platform, networking, security, and product teams.
• Communicate progress and tradeoffs to senior leadership.

Skills

DNS engineering

Cloud-native

Distributed systems

Python

Go

Kubernetes

Terraform

Puppet

Spinnaker

CI/CD

AWS

GCP

DNSSEC

DDoS protection

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

MS in Computer Science (nice-to-have)

Tools

Infoblox

AWS Route 53

Kubernetes

Terraform

Puppet

Spinnaker

CI/CD tooling

Job description

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts. Job Category Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure Job Details About Salesforce Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn't a buzzword - it's a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all. Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You're in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce. The Experience Salesforce is hiring a Senior Manager of Software Engineering to lead DNS Engineering, the team that owns the DDI (DNS, DHCP, IPAM) services infrastructure behind every Salesforce product. You'll lead a team of engineers responsible for authoritative and recursive DNS across Salesforce data centers and Hyperforce public cloud, self-service DNS and IPAM APIs, and DNS security, including DNSSEC and DDoS resilience. You'll set the multi-year strategy, own availability for this Tier-0 service, and lead the move to cloud-native, multi-provider DNS with automation and AI-assisted operations. The role suits a leader with 12+ years in software engineering, 5+ years leading teams, and deep experience with DNS and large-scale distributed systems. Every customer request to Salesforce starts with a DNS lookup. The DNS Engineering team owns this layer for Salesforce: the authoritative and service-discovery DNS that sits in front of every Salesforce product, in our first-party data centers and across Hyperforce on the public cloud. We also own the DDI (DNS, DHCP, IPAM) platform and the self-service APIs that engineers and automated pipelines use to manage records, zones, and IP space every day. The team's work spans large, mission-critical systems: Authoritative and recursive DNS on BIND and dnsdist, running on fleets across many data centers and serving very high query volumes with strict latency and availability targets (3 & 4 nines). Public cloud DNS on AWS Route 53 and GCP Cloud DNS, plus Kubernetes-native DNS automation (external-dns) for Hyperforce workloads DDI platform and APIs: services that wrap commercial DDI platforms (such as Infoblox) so record and IPAM changes are safe, validated, and auditable Security and resilience: DNSSEC, DDoS protection, hardening against dangling records and subdomain takeover, and multi-provider failover Infrastructure as Code and automation: Puppet, Terraform, Spinnaker, and CI/CD pipelines with staggered, datacenter-by-datacenter rollouts, plus observability through Splunk, Grafana, and Argus Third-Party DNS vendor relations: Our DNS infrastructure uses third-party DNS vendors to manage DNS zones on misc commercial enterprise DNS platforms. As Senior Manager of Software Engineering for DNS Engineering, you'll lead the organization that keeps this layer fast, secure, and always available. You'll set its technical direction toward a cloud-native, highly automated, AI-assisted future. You'll lead tech leads, POs and senior engineers. You'll be accountable for availability and live-site health. And you'll partner with the platform, networking, security, and product teams that depend on DNS.

What You’ll Actually Be Doing

• Set strategy and own delivery.
• Define the multi-year vision and roadmap for Salesforce DNS and DDI, and own execution from architecture through delivery to operational excellence across first-party and public-cloud environments.
• Lead and grow the organization.
• Hire, develop, and keep a diverse, high-performing team of engineers.
• Set clear goals, manage performance, remove obstacles, and develop the next generation of technical leaders.
• Own availability and trust.
• Treat DNS as Tier-0 infrastructure.
• Set availability, latency, and change-safety targets (SLOs), lead the incident and problem-management process, run blameless postmortems, and drive the fixes that keep the same incident from happening twice.
• Modernize the platform.
• Lead the move toward cloud-native, multi-provider DNS on Hyperforce, including migrations, provider abstraction, Kubernetes integration, and retiring legacy systems, without disrupting customers.
• Automate through AI and self-service.
• Grow self-service DNS and IPAM APIs, policy-as-code, and automated validation.
• Use AI-assisted development and agentic tooling to cut toil, catch risky changes before they ship, and speed up investigations.
• Strengthen security posture.
• Champion DNSSEC, DDoS resilience, secure-by-default record management, protection against dangling records, and timely patching of third-party software, in partnership with Security.
• Balance the portfolio.
• Weigh feature delivery, live-site work, operational load, and tech-debt paydown against each other, and make clear, data-driven tradeoffs that you can explain to leadership.
• Partner across Salesforce.
• Represent DNS in architecture and planning forums.
• Turn the priorities of the platform, networking, Hyperforce, and product teams into a ranked roadmap with measurable outcomes, and resolve cross-team dependencies.
• Communicate upward and outward.
• Report progress, risks, and tradeoffs to senior leadership, and act as the senior escalation point for DNS during critical incidents.

You're Our Person If...

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams
• A record of building and scaling diverse, high-performing infrastructure or platform teams, and delivering complex, highly available production systems
• Deep understanding of DNS and core internet protocols (DNS, DNSSEC, TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, load balancing) and how they behave at scale
• Experience owning Tier-0 or Tier-1 services in a 24x7x365, multi-datacenter environment, including on-call, incident management, and SLO-driven operations
• Hands-on background in distributed systems, Linux, and backend development (Python or Go preferred), with sound judgment on system design, reliability, and operational risk
• Experience with public cloud (AWS, GCP, and/or Azure), containers and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Puppet, or similar)
• Experience driving engineering productivity with AI-assisted development tools and automation
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence senior stakeholders and peer organizations
• A BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Even Better If...

• Experience running authoritative and recursive DNS at internet scale (BIND, dnsdist, PowerDNS, Unbound, or similar) and with managed DNS services such as AWS Route 53
• Experience operating DDI/IPAM platforms (such as Infoblox) and building self-service APIs on top of them
• Led large migrations from data centers to the cloud, or from one provider to many, for critical network infrastructure
• Background in DDoS mitigation, anycast, traffic engineering, or global traffic management
• Experience building agentic or ML-driven tools for detecting, investigating, and fixing operational problems
• Contributions to open source or to IETF/DNS community standards work

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you'll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we'll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love.

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