Staff Software Engineer - Managed Kubernetes products
DigitalOcean · Posted Sep 22
Cloud infrastructure, virtual machines, managed database, and AI inference services
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About the role
DigitalOcean's App Platform is a managed PaaS that lets customers ship apps from source to production on Kubernetes-backed infrastructure without managing clusters themselves, while Functions is the company's serverless compute product running event-driven workloads on a secure, multi-tenant runtime. Together these products sit on the critical path for developers deploying and scaling modern applications—and increasingly AI and agent workloads—on DigitalOcean. This Staff Software Engineer (IC5) role sets technical direction for major areas of App Platform and Functions, defining architectures that span multi-year roadmaps and driving cross-org alignment across platform, networking, and compute organizations.
What you will do
- Define Platform Architecture: Set technical direction for App Platform and Functions control planes and runtimes—designing for hyperscale multi-tenancy, regional distribution, and the evolving requirements of AI-native and enterprise customers. Your architecture decisions will span multiple teams and multi-year roadmaps.
- Lead Kubernetes Product Strategy: Architect how managed Kubernetes-backed infrastructure powers customer workloads—cluster lifecycle, reconciliation, networking, isolation, autoscaling, and operational safety—balancing developer simplicity with production reliability at cloud scale.
- Own Hard Runtime Problems: Drive solutions for high-impact platform challenges such as deployment correctness, cold-start and warm-path performance for Functions, secure workload isolation, scale-to-zero / scale-from-zero, and failure recovery across large fleets of clusters and workloads.
- Shape Cross-Org Technical Decisions: Serve as a primary technical voice in design reviews spanning App Platform, Functions, Edge, Networking, DOKS, and adjacent product teams. Identify and resolve architectural conflicts before they become production incidents.
- Establish Engineering Standards: Define and socialize best practices for the domain—API design, reconciliation patterns, observability, progressive delivery, and operational excellence—that raise the floor for the entire organization.
- Mentor Senior Engineers: Coach IC2–IC4 engineers on system design, distributed systems, Kubernetes platform engineering, and technical communication; serve as a multiplier for the team's overall capability.
- Drive Complex Programs End-to-End: Independently lead large, ambiguous, cross-functional projects from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and operational ownership.
- Translate Strategy to Leadership: Communicate platform strategy and investment rationale to senior leadership, framing technical decisions in terms of customer experience, reliability, cost efficiency, and business impact.
- Operational Excellence: Raise the bar for production ownership—SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, and tooling—so the platform remains safe and operable as it scales.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record operating at a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior IC level designing and shipping mission-critical distributed systems.
- Language Expert: Expert-level proficiency in Go, with deep experience building and operating gRPC/HTTP microservices at scale.
- Kubernetes Authority: Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals and platform patterns (controllers/operators, CRDs, scheduling, networking, multi-tenancy, cluster operations); able to design novel managed-platform systems, not just consume Kubernetes as an end user.
- PaaS / Serverless Depth: Experience building or operating PaaS, serverless, or multi-tenant control-plane/runtime systems—ideally including deployment pipelines, lifecycle reconciliation, and production isolation models.
- Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven ability to design and operate systems at cloud scale—handling consistency trade-offs, failure recovery, backpressure, multi-region concerns, and long-running reconciliation under real production conditions.
- Cloud Native: Deep experience with container orchestration, SQL datastores (MySQL/Postgres), and Infrastructure as Code; experience designing systems across multiple regions and availability zones.
- Communication & Influence: Demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus across org boundaries, mentor senior engineers, and translate platform strategy into business impact for executive audiences.
Preferred qualifications
- 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 and support
- We innovate with purpose. You'll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward tra...
About DigitalOcean
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
- 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
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Chief Product and Technology Officer
Chief Marketing Officer
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