Senior Software Engineer II

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer II (IC4) who is passionate about distributed systems orchestration, high-throughput API design, and building the multi-tenant control plane that powers Agentic AI applications.

As a Senior Software Engineer II (IC4) at DigitalOcean, you will join a dynamic engineering team dedicated to revolutionising cloud computing and AI. In this role, you will report directly to the Engineering Manager of the Sandbox Team. You will act as the technical anchor for the squad responsible for the entire management tier, user lifecycle, and API orchestration of our sandbox platform. You will design and develop the "brain" of the product, interfacing directly with developer SDKs and coordinating with underlying internal virtualisation services to deliver a seamless, secure, and scalable developer experience.

Responsibilities:

• Design and scale the core Orchestrator using Go, managing the global state, session lifecycles, and rapid allocation of sandboxes for millions of user requests.
• Design and implement robust multi-tenant API Gateways and authentication layers to securely isolate customer workloads, rate-limit abuse, and track usage for billing.
• Build high-performance routing proxies (HTTP/WebSocket/gRPC) capable of instantly tunnelling traffic from external client SDKs directly to internal service endpoints.
• Manage complex state synchronisation and service discovery patterns using tools like Consul, Nomad, or Kubernetes to ensure high availability across distributed clusters.
• Own the developer interface, optimising how the control plane surfaces real-time execution telemetry, structured logging pipelines, and file streaming back to the user's application.

Key Metrics:

• Control Plane API Latency: Maintain sub-20ms overhead for API authentication, routing, and command dispatching.
• System Uptime and Reliability: Target a 99.99% uptime SLA for the control plane API and proxy layers.
• Multi-Tenant Isolation: Ensure zero cross-tenant data leaks or unauthorised API access at the control plane level.
• Token/Session Handover Time: Minimise the time it takes from a user requesting a sandbox to the control plane establishing a secure proxy tunnel.

Requirements:

• Distributed Systems Mastery: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a heavy emphasis on building large-scale SaaS or PaaS control products using Go (Golang) or similar backend languages.
• API and Proxy Expertise: Proven experience building high-throughput REST/gRPC APIs, custom reverse proxies, or network routers handling concurrent connection scaling.
• Orchestration and State Management: Practical experience with cluster schedulers (Nomad, Kubernetes), service meshes, or distributed key-value stores (Consul, Etcd) for real-time state tracking.
• Data Layer Architecture: Strong experience modelling application state in PostgreSQL and designing high-volume telemetry ingestion pipelines using columnar data stores like ClickHouse.
• Product-First Mindset: Experience building products designed for other developers (APIs, SDKs, Cloud Consoles) with a deep empathy for developer workflows and latency constraints.
• Preferred Attributes: Familiarity with the unique orchestration challenges of Agentic AI, LLM orchestration frameworks, or building multi-tenant user platforms.