Back
DigitalOcean logo

Director of Engineering, Managed Database Service

DigitalOcean · Posted Sep 23

Cloud infrastructure, virtual machines, managed database, and AI inference services

BengaluruFull-timeHybridDirector/Executive12+ years₹80.0L–₹1.5Cr yearly100+ applicants
Cloud ComputingCloud InfrastructureIaaSDeveloper ToolsArtificial IntelligencePublic Company
Full time

Get a personal compatibility score

Add a resume for personal matches

About the role

DigitalOcean is building a next-generation cloud for AI-native developers and businesses, with Managed Databases as a foundational component. The team is responsible for a customer-facing cloud database service that powers mission-critical applications at scale. This Director of Engineering role will lead the engineering organization responsible for developing, scaling, and operating DigitalOcean's Managed Database services.

What you will do

  • Own a core database engineering charter end-to-end: Lead the engineering organization responsible for developing and operating a DigitalOcean Managed Database service, including availability, scalability, performance, durability, security, observability, fleet operations, customer experience, and roadmap execution.
  • Build and operate at cloud scale: Design and run a production cloud service that operates reliably across a large customer fleet. Build the control planes, automation, deployment systems, monitoring, incident response practices, scaling workflows, and operational mechanisms required to support a customer-facing managed service at scale.
  • Make high-judgment reliability decisions: Own the decisions that determine service reliability. Evaluate architectural tradeoffs, operational risks, customer impact, launch readiness, incident patterns, and technical debt with precision. Know when to move fast, when to slow down, when to escalate, and when to hold the line on quality.
  • Set a high bar for operational excellence: Define and execute against clear SLIs and SLOs for availability, failover, backup and restore, replication health, query performance, fleet safety, incident response, change management, and customer-visible reliability.
  • Deliver with high velocity and high quality: Create an execution culture that ships meaningful customer value quickly while maintaining service reliability. Improve roadmap predictability, reduce delivery friction, raise launch quality, and ensure the team can move fast without accumulating operational or architectural debt.
  • Lead relational database product engineering: Guide engineering decisions across replication, backup and restore, high availability, query performance, storage growth, scaling, upgrades, maintenance workflows, connection management, security, and observability.
  • Build a high-talent engineering organization: Hire, develop, and retain strong engineering talent. Build a team with clear ownership, high accountability, strong technical judgment, and a bias for action.
  • Partner across Product, SRE, Infrastructure, Support, Security, and GTM: Work closely with cross-functional partners to define the roadmap, understand customer needs, prioritize reliability investments, improve the support experience, drive adoption, and ensure the service is positioned effectively in the market.

Skills used in this role

PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBRedisValkeyKafkaOpenSearch

What the employer is looking for

  • 12+ years of engineering experience, including leadership of cloud infrastructure, database, storage, distributed systems, or large-scale platform organizations.
  • 4+ years managing engineering teams, including managers or senior technical leads.
  • Proven experience developing and operating customer-facing cloud services at scale.
  • Strong understanding of relational database systems and production database workloads.
  • Experience running high-availability production services with strong expectations for reliability, durability, security, and incident response.
  • Strong operational judgment across monitoring, alerting, incident management, change management, deployment safety, capacity planning, and fleet health.
  • High judgment in technical and operational decision-making, especially where service reliability, customer impact, and engineering velocity are in tension.
  • Ability to define a multi-quarter engineering strategy and translate it into shipped customer value.
  • Demonstrated ability to hire, grow, and retain strong engineering talent.
  • Strong cross-functional leadership with Product, SRE, Infrastructure, Support, Security, and GTM partners.
  • Clear executive communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs, risks, priorities, and customer impact.

Preferred qualifications

  • Experience building or operating managed database services such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis/Valkey, Kafka, OpenSearch, ...

Benefits and support

  • Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting

About DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean logo

DigitalOcean

Company website
LinkedInXCrunchbaseGlassdoor★4.1

DigitalOcean is an American cloud infrastructure provider and AI-native cloud platform built for developers, startups, and small-to-medium-sized businesses. The company provides simple, scalable virtual machines, managed databases, Kubernetes, and specialized inference engines designed to run modern application and agentic AI workloads.

Industry
Cloud Computing
Company size
1001-5000 employees
Founded
2011-06-24
Location
Broomfield, Colorado, USA
Funding stage
Public Company

Funding

Public Company · $174M raised

Andreessen HorowitzIA VenturesAccess IndustriesFortress Investment GroupTechstars
  • 2013-07-01Seed$3.2M
  • 2014-03-01Series A$37.2M
  • 2014-12-01Debt Financing$50M
  • 2015-07-01Series B$83M
  • 2016-04-01Debt Financing$130M
  • 2020-05-01Venture Round$50M
  • 2021-03-24IPO$775.5M

Leadership

PS
Paddy Srinivasan

Chief Executive Officer

WM
W. Matthew Steinfort

Chief Financial Officer

VK
Vinay Kumar

Chief Product and Technology Officer

LL
Leo Leung

Chief Marketing Officer

Recent coverage

Apply on company site