Senior Director - Software Engineering - DNS

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Salesforce is seeking a visionary and operationally disciplined Software Engineering leader to oversee its Global DNS Software Engineering and Operations teams. This individual will lead the design, development, and operation of one of the industry's largest and most critical DNS infrastructures, powering every product, customer interaction, and internal system across Salesforce. Operating across AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and our privately owned data centers, this highly available and automated platform is foundational to the company's success.

This high-impact role requires both strategic leadership and deep technical expertise. DNS engineering and operations teams are responsible for the full DNS stack, including authoritative and recursive systems, control planes, telemetry, alerting, and lifecycle automation. Salesforce DNS platforms support all services globally and must meet demanding standards for uptime, performance, and correctness. The role includes cross-functional collaboration with Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Engineering teams to align DNS strategy with broader business goals. This is an exceptional opportunity to shape the next generation of critical infrastructure and directly impact how Salesforce runs its global platform.

Responsibilities:

* Lead the design, development, and operation of Salesforce's global DNS infrastructure, spanning Public Cloud platforms (like AWS, GCP) and privately owned datacenters.
* Own the full DNS stack including authoritative and recursive servers, control planes, telemetry, alerting, and lifecycle automation.
* Ensure the availability, correctness, and fault tolerance of DNS services with a relentless focus on uptime and performance. (24x7x365)
* Lead the response and root cause analysis of DNS-related incidents with a strong emphasis on continuous improvement and learning.
* Guide architectural decisions, oversee complex migrations, and ensure scalable, automation-first solutions are implemented.
* Drive long-term vision for DNS within the company, including the evolution of service discovery and name resolution systems.
* Partner with engineering, infrastructure, security, and product teams to align DNS systems with broader platform and business goals.
* Represent DNS in company-wide initiatives and ensure that services meet the needs of internal and external stakeholders.
* Lead the recruitment, development, and mentorship of a diverse team of engineers and operations staff. This includes driving hiring strategies, guiding performance, and fostering a culture rooted in ownership, technical excellence, and continuous learning.
* Establish and monitor SLAs, KPIs, and operational metrics to ensure the team delivers against business and technical goals.
* Provide input to strategic planning, resource forecasting, and budget allocation related to DNS and infrastructure services.
* Effectively manage vendor relationships with our third party providers.
* Experienced dealing and operating with domain name registries and registrars.

Required Skills:

* Deep knowledge of DNS protocols, architectures (authoritative and recursive), caching strategies, and anycast/multicast network principles.
* Strong leadership and management capabilities, effectively guiding and developing engineers at all levels of experience.
* Effective communicator with experience translating technical topics into business value and strategic impact with a proven ability to influence and persuade both technical and non-technical audiences.
* Experience operating critical Internet infrastructure and services with High Availability and resiliency requirements.
* Understanding of managed DNS providers and internal service discovery mechanisms. Proficient in operating systems in AWS, GCP, or Azure, including services like EC2, VPC, Lambda, S3, IAM, and Route 53.
* Understanding of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, CI/CD concepts/tools , monitoring/observability/alerting tools (Grafana, Thousand Eyes).
* Background as a senior software development engineer with experience in hands-on design, coding and deploying large-scale applications with high availability and high security requirements.
* Strong understanding of how Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies can be applied to infrastructure management, aiding software development, capacity forecasting, operations augmentation, support intake, and cost optimization.
* Familiarity with predictive modeling, data science, and the application of analytics to cloud resource management.

Desired Skills

* 10+ years of experience in software engineering or infrastructure operations, with at least 5 years in a technical leadership or management role overseeing large-scale distributed systems.
* Proven experience designing, operating, and scaling DNS systems (authoritative and recursive) in a production environment.
* Strong technical understanding of cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and Cloud/Container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
* Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, including, IP routing, Anycast, DNSSEC, and service discovery architectures.
* Past experience as a senior software development engineer or principal-level contributor with a strong grasp of object-oriented design and backend systems.
* Familiarity with SRE principles, including incident response, operational metrics, root cause analysis, and building fault-tolerant systems.
* Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional alignment and influence stakeholders at all levels, including executive leadership.
* Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. Equivalent industry experience also considered.

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