Senior Director of Engineering - Storage Products

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the multi-year engineering strategy and roadmap for Storage Products in India, aligning closely with global product and infrastructure leadership.
• Lead, grow, and inspire a multi-team engineering organisation spanning Object Storage, Block Storage, File Storage, Backup and Snapshot services, storage infrastructure, and platform engineering.
• Partner with VP-level and C-suite stakeholders across Product, Infrastructure, Finance, and GTM teams to translate business priorities into executable technical plans.
• Drive organisational design, headcount planning, and talent strategy to scale the India engineering function in support of DigitalOcean's storage growth objectives.
• Establish engineering excellence across teams, including coding standards, architectural reviews, incident management, operational readiness, reliability engineering, and service health benchmarks.
• Champion a culture of customer obsession, operational excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement across the full software development lifecycle.
• Lead sustaining engineering strategy, including technical debt reduction, platform modernisation, operational efficiency improvements, and long-term storage platform health.
• Manage delivery accountability across multiple concurrent programs, ensuring successful preview and GA launches while proactively mitigating dependencies and execution risks.
• Drive platform scalability, durability, availability, and performance improvements across DigitalOcean's storage offerings.
• Partner closely with infrastructure teams to optimise storage economics, hardware utilisation, capacity planning, and datacenter expansion strategies.
• Recruit, retain, and develop senior engineering talent; drive performance management, career development frameworks, and succession planning across the India organisation.
• Represent the India engineering organisation in global leadership forums and serve as the primary escalation point for storage product engineering decisions.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 6+ years in senior engineering leadership or management roles, including managing managers.
• Demonstrated track record of building and scaling engineering organisations (50+ engineers) delivering cloud-scale storage platforms, distributed systems, or infrastructure products.
• Deep expertise in distributed storage systems, including object storage, block storage, file systems, data durability, replication, consistency models, and disaster recovery architectures.
• Proven ability to influence and align senior cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Infrastructure, Finance, and Operations in a global organisational structure.
• 8+ years of experience building storage, infrastructure, cloud platform, or data management products.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems at scale, including consensus protocols, replication, partitioning, fault tolerance, durability, and consistency tradeoffs.
• Experience operating large-scale storage platforms supporting multi-petabyte environments and billions of customer transactions.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise running stateful workloads and cloud-native storage services at scale.
• Experience building and operating highly available services with stringent durability, recovery point objective (RPO), and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements.
• Strong understanding of storage performance optimisation, capacity management, observability, and operational excellence.
• Exceptional communication skills, executive presence, and the ability to operate effectively across time zones in a globally distributed company.
• Track record of operating with high ownership and bias for action in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.

Nice to Have:

• Experience architecting and operating large-scale distributed storage systems such as Ceph, MinIO, OpenZFS, Lustre, GlusterFS, or similar technologies.
• Experience with object storage systems compatible with Amazon S3 APIs.
• Experience building backup, snapshot, disaster recovery, archival, or data protection solutions.
• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure workloads and storage requirements, including high-throughput file systems, data lakes, and GPU-accelerated environments.
• Contributions to open-source storage, infrastructure, or cloud-native projects.
• Experience leading engineering organisations through hypergrowth or significant organisational transformation.