Staff System Engineer - TechOps DNS & Observability

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

About

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.
• Read RFCs for fun, debug with packet captures, and are not satisfied by "it works again" without knowing why it broke.
• Automate by default and treat configuration as code.
• Bring radical candor - say the uncomfortable thing early, in service of the work, not the ego.
• Think in terms of blast radius. We use AI-assisted tooling in our development and test workflow, but production changes are always human-gated - risk awareness is a feature, not a brake.

If you have ever caused (or narrowly avoided) an interesting outage and learned something durable from it, tell us about it. That is operational experience, not a red flag.

Benefits

• Hybrid working model.
• Flexible working hours through trust-based working hours.
• At some locations a subsidized canteen and various free drinks.
• Modern office space with very good transport connections.
• Various employee discounts for activities and products.
• Employee events such as summer and winter parties, as well as workshops.
• Numerous training and development opportunities.
• Various health offers, such as sports and health courses.

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