DigitalOcean - Engineering Director - Managed Database Service

We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead a core charter in DigitalOceans Managed Database services.

This leader will be responsible for developing, scaling, and operating a customer-facing cloud database service used by thousands of developers and businesses.

The role requires deep experience building and running cloud services at scale, strong understanding of relational databases, and the leadership discipline to deliver high-quality products with speed.

This is a high-judgment role.

The reliability of the service will depend directly on this leaders ability to make sound technical, operational, architectural, and talent decisions.

They will be expected to identify risk early, make clear tradeoffs, and build a culture where reliability is owned every day, not only during incidents.

The ideal candidate combines cloud infrastructure experience, relational database expertise, strong operational judgment, and a high bar for engineering talent.

They will bring urgency without chaos, technical depth without micromanagement, and a relentless focus on customer outcomes.

What Youll Do :

• Own a core database engineering charter end-to-end.

• Lead the engineering organization responsible for developing and operating a DigitalOcean Managed Database service, including availability, scalability, performance, durability, security, observability, fleet operations, customer experience, and roadmap execution.

• Build and operate at cloud scale.

• Design and run a production cloud service that operates reliably across a large customer fleet.

• Build the control planes, automation, deployment systems, monitoring, incident response practices, scaling workflows, and operational mechanisms required to support a customer-facing managed service at scale.

• Make high-judgment reliability decisions.

• Own the decisions that determine service reliability.

• Evaluate architectural tradeoffs, operational risks, customer impact, launch readiness, incident patterns, and technical debt with precision.

• Know when to move fast, when to slow down, when to escalate, and when to hold the line on quality.

• Set a high bar for operational excellence.

• Define and execute against clear SLIs and SLOs for availability, failover, backup and restore, replication health, query performance, fleet safety, incident response, change management, and customer-visible reliability.

• Deliver with high velocity and high quality.

• Create an execution culture that ships meaningful customer value quickly while maintaining service reliability.

• Improve roadmap predictability, reduce delivery friction, raise launch quality, and ensure the team can move fast without accumulating operational or architectural debt.

• Lead relational database product engineering.

• Guide engineering decisions across replication, backup and restore, high availability, query performance, storage growth, scaling, upgrades, maintenance workflows, connection management, security, and observability.

• Build a high-talent engineering organization.

• Hire, develop, and retain strong engineering talent.

• Build a team with clear ownership, high accountability, strong technical judgment, and a bias for action.

• Partner across Product, SRE, Infrastructure, Support, Security, and GTM.

• Work closely with cross-functional partners to define the roadmap, understand customer needs, prioritize reliability investments, improve the support experience, drive adoption, and ensure the service is positioned effectively in the market.

What Success Looks Like :

• Within 12 months, success should look like :

• The managed database service is operating with clear SLOs, stronger reliability, fewer customer-impacting incidents, and better operational visibility.

• The team is shipping customer-facing improvements with higher velocity and better launch quality.

• Backup, restore, failover, scaling, upgrade, and maintenance workflows are safer, faster, and more predictable.

• The engineering organization has clear ownership, strong leaders, high talent density, and crisp accountability.

• Large customer workloads have better reference architectures, operational playbooks, escalation paths, and success patterns.

• DigitalOcean can credibly compete on simplicity, reliability, price-performance, and developer experience in managed relational databases.

Required Experience :

• 12+ years of engineering experience, including leadership of cloud infrastructure, database, storage, distributed systems, or large-scale platform organizations.

• 4+ years managing engineering teams, including managers or senior technical leads.

• Proven experience developing and operating customer-facing cloud services at scale.

• Strong understanding of relational database systems and production database workloads.

• Experience running high-availability production services with strong expectations for reliability, durability, security, and incident response.

• Strong operational judgment across monitoring, alerting, incident management, change management, deployment safety, capacity planning, and fleet health.

• High judgment in technical and operational decision-making, especially where service reliability, customer impact, and engineering velocity are in tension.

• Ability to define a multi-quarter engineering strategy and translate it into shipped customer value.

• Demonstrated ability to hire, grow, and retain strong engineering talent.

• Strong cross-functional leadership with Product, SRE, Infrastructure, Support, Security, and GTM partners.

• Clear executive communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs, risks, priorities, and customer impact.

Preferred Experience :

• Experience building or operating managed database services such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis/Valkey, Kafka, OpenSearch, or similar systems.

• Deep experience with PostgreSQL or MySQL in production environments.

• Experience with cloud database platforms such as Amazon RDS/Aurora, Google Cloud SQL/AlloyDB, Azure Database, PlanetScale, Neon, Crunchy, Percona, EDB, or similar services.

• Experience with replication, failover, backup and restore, read replicas, query performance, storage scaling, connection management, online upgrades, and database maintenance workflows.

• Experience building control planes, automation systems, fleet management systems, or self-healing infrastructure for large-scale cloud services.

• Experience supporting large customer workloads and working directly with customer-facing teams.

Key Metrics :

• Availability, failover success rate, RTO/RPO, backup success rate, restore time, and data durability.

• Fleet health, incident rate, change failure rate, mean time to detect, and mean time to recover.

• Query performance, replication lag, connection stability, scaling success rate, and upgrade success rate.

• Customer adoption, revenue growth, retention, support escalations, and large-customer success.

• Roadmap velocity, launch quality, engineering predictability, and operational debt reduction.

• Hiring quality, talent density, retention, manager effectiveness, and succession depth.

Why This Role Matters :

Managed databases are among the most important services in any cloud platform.

Customers depend on them to store critical data, run production applications, and scale their businesses.

Reliability, performance, and operational trust are not optional; they are the product.

The reliability of this service depends on leadership judgment : the quality of architectural decisions, the strength of operational mechanisms, the bar for engineering talent, and the discipline to make the right tradeoffs before customers are impacted.

DigitalOcean has a right to win by making managed databases simpler, more reliable, easier to operate, and better aligned to the needs of developers and growing businesses.

This leaders job is to build and operate a cloud database service that customers can trust for mission-critical workloads while creating an engineering organization that moves fast, raises the talent bar, and delivers with discipline.

This job is located in Bengaluru, India.

Why Youll Like Working for DigitalOcean :

• We innovate with purpose.

• Youll 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, youll 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 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.

• DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer.

• 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.

• Application Limit : You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period.

• This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.