Staff Software Engineer – Managed Kubernetes Products

About the role

DigitalOcean is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of its Managed Kubernetes‑backed App Platform and Functions services. You will shape multi‑year architecture, drive cross‑team alignment, and set engineering standards for a platform that powers modern, AI‑native workloads at cloud scale.

Key responsibilities

• Define platform architecture for App Platform and Functions control planes, focusing on hyperscale multi‑tenancy, regional distribution, and AI‑native requirements.
• Lead Kubernetes product strategy, covering cluster lifecycle, reconciliation, networking, isolation, autoscaling, and operational safety.
• Own hard runtime problems such as deployment correctness, cold‑start performance, secure workload isolation, and scale‑to‑zero behavior.
• Shape cross‑org technical decisions by participating in design reviews across App Platform, Functions, Edge, Networking, and DOKS teams.
• Establish engineering standards for API design, reconciliation patterns, observability, progressive delivery, and operational excellence.
• Mentor senior engineers (IC2–IC4) on system design, distributed systems, and Kubernetes platform engineering.

Required profile

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record at a Staff or Principal level designing mission‑critical distributed systems.
• Expert‑level proficiency in Go and extensive experience building gRPC/HTTP microservices at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals, controllers/operators, CRDs, scheduling, networking, and multi‑tenancy.
• Experience building or operating PaaS, serverless, or multi‑tenant control‑plane/runtime systems.

Required skills

• Go
• Kubernetes
• gRPC / HTTP microservices
• Containers (including Firecracker, gVisor)
• CNI networking & service mesh
• SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
• Infrastructure as Code