Director of Engineering

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.

The App Platform team is at the core of Digital Ocean's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. Our mission is to build a fully managed platform that allows developers to build, deploy, and scale their applications simply by pushing code, without ever worrying about the underlying infrastructure. We manage the end-to-end experience, from source code to a globally available application, leveraging a modern stack to solve complex challenges in distributed systems, container orchestration, and developer experience.

What You'll Be Doing

As the Director of Engineering, you will lead the entire App Platform engineering organization. You will be responsible for the long-term technical vision, strategic roadmap, operational health, and leadership of the multiple teams that build and run the platform.

* Lead and Mentor:
Lead, mentor, and grow a multi-team engineering organization, focusing on developing your Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders.

* Drive the Strategic

Roadmap:

Partner with senior leadership in Product, Design, and GTM to define the long-term strategic vision and multi-year roadmap for the App Platform.

* Oversee Full Lifecycle Development:
Scale and optimize the organization's execution across the entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), ensuring your teams adhere to agile principles and deliver high-quality, high-velocity results.

* Technical & Architectural Leadership:
Provide high-level technical and architectural direction for the entire App Platform ecosystem. Empower your organization to make high-impact architectural decisions that align with the long-term vision for scalability and reliability. Deep expertise in Golang and Kubernetes (k8s) is essential to guide your senior engineers and managers.

* Operational Excellence:
Take ultimate ownership of the platform's health, reliability, and performance. You will drive a culture of operational excellence across your organization, ensuring your teams are customer-obsessed and accountable for meeting and exceeding SLAs.

* Deliver Value:
Develop and track Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for your entire organization, aligning them with broader company goals and ensuring your teams are delivering measurable business value.

* Collaborate Cross-Functionally:
Act as the key engineering stakeholder for App Platform, partnering with senior leaders across Digital Ocean (including Kubernetes, Storage, and Networking) to build a seamless and cohesive product experience.

What We'll Expect From You

* Leadership

Experience:

Extensive leadership experience, including a proven track record of managing other engineering managers and leading multi-team organizations.

* Technical Expertise (Must-Have):
Deep technical expertise and strategic understanding of Golang and Kubernetes. You must be comfortable guiding senior-level technical and architectural discussions and setting the long-term technical direction for the platform.

* SDLC & Application Development:
Strong experience in scaling modern application development and a deep understanding of the SDLC process at an organizational level. You are an expert in agile methodologies and best practices for version control systems like Git.

* AI-Assisted Development:
Awareness of the modern developer landscape, including the use of Generative AI and AI-assisted "vibe coding" tools (like Git Hub Copilot, Cursor, etc.) to accelerate development, debugging, and platform interaction.

* Cloud & PaaS Knowledge:
Significant experience building, managing, or defining strategy for services in a public cloud environment (DO, AWS, GCP, Azure). Direct, deep experience with PaaS, container orchestration, or CI/CD systems is a major plus.

* Distributed Systems:
Strong foundation in building and operating scalable, reliable, and performant distributed systems at scale.

* Operational Rigor & Customer Obsession: A deep commitment to operational excellence focused on meeting and exceeding SLAs. You are customer-obsessed, using monitoring and observability not just to maintain platform health, but to guarantee a reliable and positive end-user experience. You believe in "you build it, you run it."

* Product-Minded: A strong, product-minded leader with experience integrating user feedback and market analysis into engineering strategy. You focus on delivering business value, not just technical solutions.

* Excellent Communication:
Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to communicate complex technical strategy to executive, technical, and…