Staff Software Engineer — Networking & DNS Infrastructure

BlueCat Networks is hiring for a Staff Software Engineer to join their onsite team in Toronto, Canada. The company builds connectivity and security solutions that help some of the world’s largest organizations keep networks running smoothly and securely. The role focuses on the core data plane of a production DNS platform, written in Rust, with an emphasis on high throughput and low latency. It’s a hands-on engineering position that puts you close to the problems customers face, translating real-world needs into solid technical solutions.

The company emphasizes a culture built on trust, listening, and support, with teams around the globe. If you want to advance your career with a team that values collaboration, integrity, and practical impact, this may be a fit. The role is full-time and onsite in Toronto, inviting someone who enjoys working closely with product and customers to shape resilient network infrastructure.

Shaping the DNS data plane at scale

You’ll contribute to a high-performance DNS engine by designing and implementing its critical components, including resolvers, forwarders, caching layers, and the pipelines that process requests, all in Rust.

You’ll implement DNS protocol features across UDP and TCP transports and modern options like DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS, as well as DNSSEC and related standards such as EDNS Client Subnet.

You’ll add traffic-management and reliability capabilities such as global server load balancing, health-checking, policy evaluation, response rewriting, and security filtering to protect and optimize traffic flows.

You’ll identify hot paths and optimize them, focusing on memory usage, data structures (like tries and caches), connection pooling and multiplexing, and you’ll validate improvements through benchmarks and profiling.

You’ll integrate the data plane with control-plane services, handling configuration updates across distributed deployed nodes so changes propagate consistently.

You’ll own the observability of your components, delivering meaningful metrics, structured logging and tracing, and diagnostic tooling that illuminates production behavior.

You’ll write thorough tests at unit, integration, and component levels, keeping the build healthy and the codebase clean through linting, formatting, dependency hygiene, and security advisories.

You’ll also work directly with customers and product teams to understand problems beyond the requested features, collaborating with product management to shape roadmaps based on feasibility and real leverage, and reproducing and diagnosing issues in production traffic to craft lasting fixes.

What you’ll bring to the team

Here’s what the team is looking for, with the must-haves and the nice-to-haves grouped for clarity.

• Strong systems programming experience in Rust, including asynchronous work with the Tokio ecosystem
• Solid grounding in networking fundamentals such as TCP/UDP, TLS, HTTP, and ideally DNS or another wire protocol
• Experience building performance-sensitive concurrent code and a habit of measuring improvements with benchmarks and profiling
• A test-first mindset focused on correctness, edge cases, graceful shutdowns, backpressure, and deterministic behavior under concurrency
• Comfort working across a large workspace with crates, shared libraries, plugin boundaries, and CI processes
• Strong communication skills and genuine customer empathy, able to talk with non-engineers and translate fuzzy problems into concrete engineering work

Nice-to-have capabilities that would help you hit the ground running include open source contributions in the Rust/Tokio ecosystem, knowledge of DNS internals (record types, SOA/TTL handling, DNSSEC, ECS, dnstap), production observability practices with Prometheus and tracing, experience with Protobuf/gRPC and service discovery, and familiarity with control-plane/data-plane architectures. Additional pluses are allocator tuning and low-level performance work, experience upgrading language toolchains and managing dependencies and security posture, and prior work directly with customers or in a product-partnered engineering role.

Compensation, perks and practical details

The company offers comprehensive benefits that support health, financial well-being, and overall wellness. In addition, there are perks such as a professional development budget, dedicated wellness days and a wellness week, a lifestyle spending account, and an employee recognition program.

The position is full-time and onsite in Toronto, Canada, with the usual expectations around the company’s equal opportunity commitments. BlueCat states it is committed to inclusion and diversity and promotes equal employment opportunities for applicants from all backgrounds, including minorities, women, protected veterans, and individuals with disabilities. The company also supports discussions about compensation without retaliation.

Tips to help you stand out

Put your Rust systems programming and async experience up front on your resume, especially any projects that deal with high-throughput or low-latency workloads and the specific technologies mentioned like tokio and DNS-like components.

When you describe your background, highlight concrete improvements you’ve delivered, such as performance gains from profiling or memory optimizations, and note any benchmarking results you can share to prove the impact of your changes.

Be ready to talk through design decisions for a DNS engine, including components like resolvers, caching, and protocol handling, and explain how you would approach observability and testing to keep a complex system healthy in production.

Consider a pointed question to ask during the interview about how the data plane interacts with the control plane, how configuration updates propagate across distributed nodes, or how latency budgets are measured and improved in production traffic.