Staff Software Engineer - Managed Kubernetes products
DigitalOcean5 hours ago
Hyderābād, IndiaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction and define architectures for App Platform and Functions control planes and runtimes across multi-year roadmaps.
- Architect managed Kubernetes-backed infrastructure covering cluster lifecycle, reconciliation, networking, isolation, autoscaling, and operational safety.
- Solve platform challenges including deployment correctness, Function cold starts, scale-to-zero, workload isolation, and fleet-wide failure recovery.
- Lead technical design reviews and resolve architectural decisions across App Platform, Functions, Edge, Networking, DOKS, and adjacent organizations.
- Establish standards for API design, reconciliation, observability, progressive delivery, and operational excellence.
- Mentor IC2–IC4 engineers in system design, distributed systems, Kubernetes platform engineering, and technical communication.
- Lead ambiguous, cross-functional programs from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and operational ownership.
- Communicate platform strategy and investment rationale to senior leadership.
- Improve production ownership through SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, and tooling.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience and a proven Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior individual-contributor track record designing and shipping mission-critical distributed systems.
- Expert-level Go proficiency and deep experience building and operating gRPC/HTTP microservices at scale.
- Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals and platform patterns, including controllers/operators, CRDs, scheduling, networking, multi-tenancy, and cluster operations.
- Experience building or operating PaaS, serverless, or multi-tenant control-plane and runtime systems, ideally including deployment pipelines, lifecycle reconciliation, and production isolation models.
- Proven ability to design and operate cloud-scale distributed systems involving consistency trade-offs, failure recovery, backpressure, multi-region concerns, and long-running reconciliation.
- Experience with container orchestration, SQL datastores such as MySQL or Postgres, Infrastructure as Code, multiple regions, and availability zones.
- Demonstrated ability to build technical consensus across organizational boundaries, mentor senior engineers, and communicate strategy to executive audiences.
- Preferred experience with CNI networking, service meshes, autoscaling, scale-to-zero architectures, containers, gVisor, Firecracker, microVMs, cold-start optimization, progressive delivery, platform SLOs, large-scale incident management, and cloud-native or Kubernetes open-source projects.
Benefits
- Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
- Access to LinkedIn Learning with more than 10,000 courses.
- Employee Assistance Program, local employee meetups, and flexible time off.
- Potential bonus, equity compensation, equity grants upon hire, and an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
- Hybrid role located in Hyderabad, India.
Tech Stack
About DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean provides cloud infrastructure and platform services for developers, startups, and small to mid-sized businesses, including virtual machines (Droplets), managed Kubernetes and databases, object/block storage, networking, and GPUs for AI workloads. It operates a usage-based, self-service public cloud with APIs, CLI, and a marketplace to deploy and scale applications. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, DigitalOcean is a public company listed on the NYSE.