Director of Engineering, Managed Database Service
Lead the engineering for DigitalOcean's Managed Database service, building and operating cloud-scale relational databases with high reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Bengaluru
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Category
- Not specified
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 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.
Nice to have
- 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.
Full description
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.
DigitalOcean is building a next-generation cloud for AI-native developers and businesses. Managed Databases are foundational to that mission. They power customer applications, store mission-critical data, and must meet a high bar for reliability, performance, security, durability, observability, and operational excellence.
We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead a core charter in DigitalOcean’s 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 leader’s 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 You’ll 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.