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Principal Engineer, Managed Database Services

San Francisco

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. 

As a Principal Engineer you'll spearhead the design, development, and operation of scalable, high‑availability, and high-performance database platforms across relational and non-relational managed services (Managed MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, etc.) and scale-out variants that scale to petabytes of data. Drive architectural vision, technical excellence, and innovation across both backend systems and customer-facing interactions.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Architect and Build
    • Design and evolve the architecture of large-scale distributed database systems optimized for scalability, reliability, low-latency, and cost efficiency.
    • Architect solutions for storage engines, indexing, querying, caching, replication, and high availability, drawing from best practices in both relational and NoSQL paradigms.
    • Roll out new services by taking on a hands-on lead role as required to ensure timely delivery 
  • Technical Leadership
    • Establish and enforce technical standards, coding practices, tooling, and infrastructure guidelines across the database engineering teams.
    • Mentor other senior engineers, shaping the team’s culture of architectural rigor and operational excellence.
  • Cross-functional Collaboration
    • Work with product managers, stakeholders, and business leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable technical roadmaps.
    • Guide customer-facing teams (e.g., consultants, support, sales engineers) to define database solutions and migration strategies aligned with organizational goals
  • Reliability, Performance & Scaling
    • Lead Operations Excellence for database services, establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while raising the bar 
    • Oversee availability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, and disaster recovery for database platforms.
    • Drive automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring) to optimize operations
  • Innovation & Future Roadmapping
    • Research and integrate advanced capabilities (e.g., AI‑assisted tooling, MCP protocols) to enhance developer workflows and metadata accessibility across database types.

Qualifications:

  • Technical Experience: ≥ 12–15 years in distributed systems architecture, database internals (storage, indexing, query optimizers), and cloud infrastructure.
  • Domain Expertise: Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade systems on one or more database services in the Cloud.
  • Leadership & Collaboration: Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact.
  • Automation Proficiency: Familiarity with infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and observability frameworks.
  • Communication & Mentoring: Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring senior and junior engineers; translating complex concepts across engineering and business teams.

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 $247,680 - $371,520 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. 
  • We value diversity and inclusion. We are an equal-opportunity employer, and recognize that diversity of thought and background builds stronger teams and products to serve our customers. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. 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.

*This is a remote role

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