Staff System Engineer (f/m/d) - TechOps DNS & Observability

Meyandy LLC; Germany (OH); On-site; USD 104,000 - 139,000; Full time

Job summary

IONOS invites experienced engineers to join our DNS squad. You will operate authoritative and recursive DNS, DHCP, forward-proxy, and IPAM services to ensure reliability at internet scale.

You will automate with Puppet, build metrics, and drive root-cause analysis within ITIL processes. This role includes on-call rotation for KRITIS/NIS2 infrastructure and contributes to ongoing DIM open-source work.

Qualifications

• Experience operating DNS, DHCP or comparable network services in production.
• Familiar with infrastructure automation and Puppet.
• Ability to measure and improve systems with metrics and dashboards.
• Experience with ITIL incident, problem, risk and change processes.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotation (monthly).

Responsibilities

• Operate, harden and evolve DNS, DHCP, proxy, and IP management services.
• Automate infrastructure as code and reduce toil.
• Instrument and measure performance with dashboards and signals.
• Drive root-cause analysis and lasting fixes through structured ITIL processes.
• Take part in the team's on-call rotation (monthly) and learn to reduce on-call load.

Skills

Analytical thinking

Incident management

On-call leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

PowerDNS

ISC DHCP

Squid

chrony

Puppet

GitOps

BIRD

rsyslog

collectd

Python

Go

Java

Bash

ClickHouse

MariaDB

PostgreSQL

Job description

At IONOS, the leading European provider of cloud infrastructure, cloud services and hosting services, you will work together with a wide range of teams. We are characterized by open structures, a friendly working culture and flat hierarchies with a strong team spirit. We firmly believe that work and fun are compatible, and offer you the right environment for this. Our constant growth means that we are always looking for new colleagues. Become part of IONOS and grow with us.

Our DNS squad runs the naming, addressing and time services the rest of the internet quietly assumes will always be there: authoritative and recursive DNS, DHCP, forward proxy and NTP, together with the IP address management that ties them together. Our authoritative platform serves roughly 20 million zones from 12 anycast locations across two autonomous systems. Our DNS/DHCP/IPAM management system, DIM, is open source (github.com/ionos-core/dim) - what we build here, others run too.

Tasks

What You Will Do

• Operate, harden and evolve our authoritative and recursive DNS, DHCP, forward-proxy, DNS and IP Management (DIM) and NTP services so they stay boringly reliable at internet scale.
• Automate everything that should be automated - infrastructure as code in Puppet, reviewed and version-controlled - and remove the toil that does not need a human.
• Instrument and measure: build the metrics, dashboards and signals that tell us what our services are actually doing, because we cannot improve what we cannot see.
• Drive root-cause analysis and lasting fixes through structured ITIL Incident, Problem, Risk and Change management - we make our work and our challenges transparent on purpose.
• Take part in the team's on-call rotation for this KRITIS/NIS2 infrastructure (your turn comes up roughly once a month - mandatory and separately compensated) and use what you learn on-call to make the next on-call quieter.

Qualifications

Tools of the Trade

You will work with the protocol implementations and the tooling we use to deliver these services and keep them stable:

• DNS / DHCP / proxy / time: PowerDNS (authoritative, recursor, dnsdist), ISC DHCP (experience with or appetite for Kea is welcome), Squid, chrony.
• Platform & automation: Enterprise Linux 9, Puppet (GitOps), BIRD, rsyslog, collectd.
• Languages: Python, Go, Java, Bash — plus the classic unix toolbelt (awk, sed, git) that still does more than people expect.
• Data: ClickHouse, MariaDB, PostgreSQL.

You do not need to have mastered all of these on day one. You do need to be the kind of engineer who is comfortable reaching for the right one and going deep when it matters.

Nice to have

We care less about a perfect CV than about how you think. We work by a few principles, and we mean them:

• "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it."\ We make data-driven decisions and monitor continuously.
• "Do it once, do it right."\ Quality and attention to detail matter to us - shortcuts come back as incidents.
• "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."\ We strive for simplicity and efficiency in every solution; the best fix is often the one that deletes complexity.

We appreciate candidates who:

• Have operated DNS, DHCP or comparable network services in production, ideally at scale and under real reliability obligations.