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.

• 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,