Staff Software Engineer - Managed Kubernetes products

Dive in and do the best work of your career at DigitalOcean. Journey alongside a strong community of top talent who are relentless in their drive to build the simplest scalable cloud. If you have a growth mindset, naturally like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment of a true industry disruptor, you’ll find your place here.  We value winning together-while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world. 

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer (IC5) to join our App Platform and Functions engineering organization. App Platform is DigitalOcean’s managed PaaS: customers ship apps from source to production on Kubernetes-backed infrastructure without managing clusters themselves. Functions is our 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.

In this role, you will set technical direction for major areas of App Platform and Functions-not only within your immediate team, but across adjacent platform, networking, and compute organizations. You will define architectures that span multi-year roadmaps, drive cross-org alignment on how PaaS and serverless intersect with Kubernetes, edge, security, and AI workloads, and establish the engineering standards the team builds against. If you are a seasoned engineer who wants to combine deep technical expertise with broad organizational impact, this is the role for you.

What You’ll 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.

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean

• 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.

Nice to Have

• 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.

*This job is located in Hyderabad, India

JR: 2026-8135

#LI-Hybrid

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

• We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful sense of responsibility for customers, products, employees, and decisions.
• We prioritize career development. At DO, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education. All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
• We care about your well-being.  Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
• We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

Application Limit:  You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.