Staff Software Engineer - Managed Kubernetes products

About this job

DigitalOcean is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its App Platform and Functions engineering team in Hyderabad. In this role, you will help build and scale DigitalOcean's managed PaaS and serverless compute products, which allow customers to run modern applications and AI workloads on Kubernetes infrastructure without managing clusters directly. You will guide technical direction across multiple teams, shape multi-year architecture roadmaps, and solve complex runtime challenges. A normal day in this position involves defining platform architectures, leading Kubernetes product strategy, driving solutions for high-impact runtime problems, shaping cross-organization technical decisions, establishing engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and collaborating with leadership to align platform strategy with customer experience and business goals.

Responsibilities

• Define platform architecture for control planes and runtimes for hyperscale multi-tenancy and regional distribution.
• Lead Kubernetes product strategy by architecting managed infrastructure for cluster lifecycle, networking, and autoscaling.
• Own hard runtime problems including deployment correctness, cold-start performance, and secure workload isolation.
• Shape cross-org technical decisions across App Platform, Functions, Edge, Networking, and DOKS teams.
• Establish engineering standards and best practices for API design, observability, and operational excellence.
• Mentor IC2-IC4 engineers on system design, distributed systems, and Kubernetes platform engineering.
• Drive complex programs end-to-end from problem framing and design through implementation and rollout.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience operating at a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior IC level.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go with deep experience building and operating gRPC/HTTP microservices at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals and platform patterns including controllers, operators, CRDs, and scheduling.
• Experience building or operating PaaS, serverless, or multi-tenant control-plane/runtime systems.
• Proven ability to design and operate distributed systems at cloud scale handling consistency trade-offs and failure recovery.
• Deep experience with container orchestration, SQL datastores like MySQL or Postgres, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus, mentor senior engineers, and communicate with executive audiences.

Good to have

• Experience with CNI networking, service mesh, autoscaling, or scale-to-zero architectures.
• Familiarity with function and runtime isolation technologies like containers, gVisor, or Firecracker microVMs.
• Experience with progressive delivery, platform SLOs, and large-scale incident management.
• Contributions to open-source Kubernetes, CNCF, or cloud-native ecosystem projects.
• Prior experience building developer-facing cloud products focused on simplicity and reliability.

Who should apply

This role suits seasoned software engineers with extensive experience in distributed systems and Kubernetes platform engineering who want to combine deep technical expertise with broad organizational impact. Candidates should have a growth mindset, think big and bold, and thrive in a fast-paced environment. This is a senior-level position requiring over a decade of experience, so it is not suitable for freshers.

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