Systems Engineer, DNS

Cloudflare, Inc.; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cloudflare, Inc. is seeking a Systems Engineer on the DNS team in Austin, TX to own medium-to-large projects from design to delivery, mentor juniors, and help improve resilience and architecture of our DNS services.

You will write production code in Rust or Go, expand the DNS infrastructure, and collaborate with Product and stakeholders to shape requirements. A strong foundation in systems programming and networking is expected.

Qualifications

• BA/BS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent.
• Strong systems programming fundamentals, including performance, concurrency, and networking.
• Ability to write production code in Rust or Go, or quickly learn another language.
• Willingness to own changes beyond code: rollout, monitoring, on-call.
• DNS experience is welcome, not required.
• Ability to drive projects to completion and scope work for others.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and expand DNS infrastructure, implementing features for customers.
• Write high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code that improves systems.
• Serve as SME for moderately complex systems, guiding project questions.
• Proactively identify issues and propose solutions to improve processes and tech.
• Collaborate with Product and stakeholders on PRDs.
• Mentor and onboard junior team members through code/design reviews.
• Debug and resolve complex service issues to improve resilience.

Skills

Systems programming

Rust/Go

Concurrency

Networking

Code quality

Project ownership

Mentoring

On-call

DNS experience

Education

BA/BS in CS or related field

Job description

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Available Locations: Austin, TX

About the DNS team

Cloudflare runs one of the largest DNS infrastructures in the world. We provide authoritative DNS for millions of Internet properties and operate 1.1.1.1, a public recursive resolver. Aggregated our authoritative DNS and resolver platforms handle around 3 trillion DNS queries per day.

Our DNS systems are custom built internally, so we’ve developed a lot of proprietary technology that operates at scale, iterating constantly to meet new scaling and reliability requirements. The work spans protocol implementation, distributed systems, performance, reliability, and the operational tooling behind them.

Our team builds and operates both services, plus the systems that publish records, distribute changes, and serve queries across Cloudflare's global network.

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. We are looking for an engineer who can solve complex issues with minimal help and contribute to shaping features and processes within a talented, collaborative team.

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

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo : Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project : In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1 : We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!