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Principal Software Engineer (PaaS)

External
digitalocean98 logoDigitalocean98 · Seattle
$227K–$284K/yrFull-timeOn-site3w ago
CI/CDDigitalOceanJavaLeadershipMentoringObservability
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Responsibilities

  • Architect and guide the implementation of high-scale, reliable, and secure systems that underpin our PaaS offerings.
  • Drive technical direction and make foundational decisions on system design, scalability, observability, and developer experience.
  • Partner with product managers and engineering leadership to define short- and long-term roadmap priorities.
  • Identify platform bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and future risks-and design solutions that proactively address them.
  • Collaborate across teams to ensure seamless integration between platform services, infrastructure, and developer tools.
  • Mentor engineers at all levels and contribute to a culture of technical excellence, inclusivity, and impact.
  • Stay ahead of emerging technologies, patterns, and best practices in the PaaS, serverless, and cloud-native ecosystem.
  • Key Metrics:
  • Platform availability and system performance
  • Developer adoption and satisfaction
  • Technical debt reduction and architectural clarity
  • Engineering velocity and cross-team alignment
  • What You'll Add to DigitalOcean:
  • 11+ years of experience designing and building distributed systems at scale.
  • Expertise in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, C++, Java) and strong fundamentals in systems architecture and infrastructure.
  • Proven experience leading the design of large-scale services used by 1000s (or millions) of customers.
  • Passion for mentoring and elevating those around you-technical leadership is about multiplying impact.
  • Compensation Range:
  • $227,040 - $283,800
  • *This is a hybrid role
  • JR: 2025-7225
  • #LI-Hybrid
  • Why You'll Like Working for DigitalOcean
  • DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of

Benefits

Paid time offFlexible scheduleEquity / stock optionsPerformance bonus

Additional Information

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. We're looking for a Principal Engineer to drive the technical direction and architecture of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) at DigitalOcean. Our mission is to make deploying, scaling, and managing applications as simple and seamless as possible for developers around the world-from first deploy to internet scale. As a Principal Engineer on the PaaS team, you'll play a key role in designing and building the next generation of cloud-native services such as App Platform, Functions, and CI/CD. You'll architect systems that power our global infrastructure, partner closely with engineering and product teams across the company, and mentor engineers to level up the entire organization. This is a unique opportunity to shape how developers build and ship software on a platform purpose-built for simplicity and scale. We're looking for someone who can span technical strategy and hands-on execution-someone who thrives on solving complex distributed problems and multiplying the impact of everyone around them.


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