Staff Software Engineer - Managed Kubernetes products

The role

You will set technical direction for App Platform and Functions by defining architectures and engineering standards. You will lead Kubernetes product strategy and mentor senior engineers across the organization.

What you will do

• Set technical direction for App Platform and Functions control planes and runtimes
• Architect how managed Kubernetes-backed infrastructure powers customer workloads
• Drive solutions for high-impact platform challenges like deployment correctness and performance
• Serve as a primary technical voice in design reviews across product teams
• Define and socialize engineering best practices
• Coach IC2–IC4 engineers on system design and distributed systems
• Lead large, ambiguous, cross-functional projects from design to implementation
• Communicate platform strategy and investment rationale to senior leadership
• Raise the bar for production ownership including SLOs and incident response

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• Proven track record operating at a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior IC level designing and shipping mission-critical distributed systems
• Expert-level proficiency in Go
• Deep experience building and operating gRPC/HTTP microservices at scale
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals and platform patterns
• Experience building or operating PaaS, serverless, or multi-tenant control-plane/runtime systems
• Proven ability to design and operate systems at cloud scale
• Deep experience with container orchestration, SQL datastores (MySQL/Postgres), and Infrastructure as Code
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus across org boundaries

Nice to have

• Experience with CNI networking, service mesh, autoscaling, or scale-to-zero architectures
• Familiarity with function/runtime isolation technologies (containers, gVisor, Firecracker/microVMs) and cold-start optimization
• Experience with progressive delivery (canary / blue-green), platform SLOs, and large-scale incident management
• Contributions to open-source Kubernetes, CNCF, or cloud-native ecosystem projects
• Prior experience building developer-facing cloud products where simplicity and reliability are first-class product goals

Benefits

• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy
• Flexible time off
• Local team meetups
• Mental health and well being support
• Equity compensation
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Annual bonus plan

Before you apply

• You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period

About the company

DigitalOcean is a technology company that aims to build the simplest scalable cloud. They value winning together, learning, and having fun.