Platform Engineer

Position: Staff Platform Engineer
Dive in and do the best work of your career rney 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're looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to serve as the embedded technical leader for the Migration track within our new Forward Engineering organization. In this high-leverage role, you won't just write code; you'll design and enforce the technical standards and automation architecture that enables the entire team to scale. Your work will directly translate one-off customer projects into repeatable, reliable, revenue-driving products.

You will be responsible for creating the automation platform used by the other engineers (Infra, DB, K8s) to achieve minimal variation in migration cycle time. This is a hands-on technical leadership position ideal for an expert who excels at standardizing practices and mentoring peers.

What You'll Be Doing:

* Design and Architect Automation:
Lead the technical design and implementation of the core automation platform, including reusable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules (Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines.

* Drive Repeatability (Playbooks):
Own the engineering roadmap for tooling that ensures migration steps are documented, testable, and automated, directly supporting the KRs for reduced cycle time and repeatable processes.

* Establish Standards:
Define and enforce operational excellence, coding standards, observability requirements, and security practices across all migration tooling built by the Forward Engineering team.

* Technical Mentorship:
Serve as the hands-on technical lead, mentoring the mid-level Infrastructure and Database engineers on best practices for building scalable, resilient systems.

* Observability Platform:
Implement and maintain a standardized observability stack (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana) to provide visibility into migration velocity, status, and system health for both customers and internal stakeholders.

* Cross-Functional Tooling:
Collaborate with the Software Engineer (Integrations) to ensure internal tooling interfaces seamlessly with Digital Ocean platform services.

What We'll Expect From You:

* 8+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Dev Ops roles, with a proven track record operating at the Staff or Principal IC level.

* Deep expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), particularly large-scale usage of Terraform or Cloud Formation.

* Expert-level knowledge of CI/CD practices and tooling (e.g., Git Lab CI, Git Hub Actions) and experience building self-service pipelines for other engineers.

* Fluency in system programming languages (Go or Python) used for building internal tooling and automation APIs.

* Proven ability to drive technical alignment and mentorship across multiple ICs.

* Strong experience designing and maintaining production monitoring and logging systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).

* Excellent communication skills, with the ability to document complex technical decisions (ADRs) clearly and concisely.

* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

Why You'll Like Working for Digital Ocean

* 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…