Director of Engineering, Managed Database Service

About the role

DigitalOcean is building a next‑generation cloud for AI‑native developers and businesses. The Managed Database service powers customer applications and must meet high standards for reliability, performance, security and operational excellence. As Director of Engineering you will lead the end‑to‑end charter for this customer‑facing cloud database service.

Key responsibilities

• Own the engineering organization that designs, builds and operates the Managed Database service, covering availability, scalability, performance, durability, security and observability.
• Design and run production cloud services at scale, including control planes, automation, deployment systems and incident response practices.
• Make high‑judgment reliability decisions, evaluating architectural trade‑offs, operational risks and customer impact.
• Define and execute SLIs/SLOs for availability, failover, backup, replication health and fleet safety.
• Hire, develop and retain top engineering talent, establishing clear ownership and accountability.

Required profile

• 12+ years of engineering experience with leadership of cloud infrastructure, database or large‑scale platform teams.
• 4+ years managing engineering managers or senior technical leads.
• Proven track record delivering customer‑facing cloud services at scale.
• Strong understanding of relational database systems and production workloads.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, grow and retain high‑performing engineering talent.

Required skills

• Cloud infrastructure and distributed systems
• Relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
• High‑availability and disaster‑recovery design (replication, failover, backup/restore)
• Monitoring, alerting, incident management and capacity planning
• Automation, control‑plane and fleet‑management engineering
• Performance tuning, query optimization and storage scaling