Senior Director of Engineering, Managed MySQL

Responsibilities

• End-to-End Ownership: Lead the engineering organization (availability, scalability, performance, security, and long-term architecture) for both Standard and Advanced editions of Managed MySQL on DigitalOcean.
• Operational Excellence: Set the bar for a tier-0 cloud database service with clear SLIs/SLOs and robust incident response.
• Production-Grade Platform: Drive high-availability architecture, automated failover, connection routing, and seamless scaling.
• Serve Demanding Customers: Support large-scale, business-critical workloads through improved tooling, VPC-based deployment, and clear reference architectures.
• Define AI-Native Strategy: Create the roadmap for MySQL as an operational data substrate for AI (agentic systems, metadata, high-throughput ingestion).
• Strategic Architecture: Own long-term technical strategy, including replication, fleet automation, and multi-region resilience.
• Build High-Performing Teams: Recruit and lead strong engineering talent with a focus on ownership, accountability, and reliability.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with Product, GTM, and SRE teams to align the engineering roadmap with market needs.
• Technical Rigor: Champion high standards, simplifying complexity and preventing reliability debt.
• What Success Looks Like (12 Months)
• Tier-0 Reliability: Achieved clear SLOs and measurably improved incident response.
• Enhanced Scaling: Successful support for large, complex production workloads.
• Enterprise Support: Established migration paths and operational playbooks for large customers.
• AI-Ready Roadmap: Delivered a differentiated, AI-native database strategy.
• Organizational Maturity: Clear ownership boundaries and a scalable technical strategy.
• Competitive Positioning: DigitalOcean competes effectively on reliability and price-performance.
• What You'll Add to DigitalOcean
• Preferred Experience: Expertise in MySQL or similar ecosystems (RDS, Aurora, Vitess). Experience building HA architectures, scaling databases (sharding, read scaling), and familiarity with AI-native data patterns (agent state, event-driven architecture). Open-source credibility is a plus.
• Key Metrics
• Reliability: Availability, RTO/RPO, backup/restore success, data durability.
• Operational Health: Incident rate, change failure rate, MTTD/MTTR.
• Performance: Query performance, replication lag, scaling workflow success.
• Business Impact: Adoption, revenue growth, retention, and onboarding success.
• Execution: Velocity, hiring, and retention.
• Why This Role Matters
• MySQ

Benefits

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. DigitalOcean is building a next-generation cloud for AI-native developers and businesses. Managed MySQL is a foundational service in that ecosystem: it powers production applications, SaaS platforms, commerce systems, metadata stores, identity systems, application backends, and increasingly the transactional state layer for AI-native applications. We are looking for a senior engineering leader to own DigitalOcean's Managed MySQL service and engineering charter end-to-end. This leader will be responsible for the current Managed MySQL offering while raising the bar for reliability, performance, scale, durability, observability, security, and operational excellence. This is also a strategic product and architecture role. MySQL remains one of the most widely adopted operational databases for developers and digital businesses. As AI-native applications emerge, MySQL will continue to serve as the system of record for user state, application state, billing data, customer metadata, product data, permissions, workflow state, and high-throughput transactional workloads. The right leader will shape the architecture and technology strategy required to evolve Managed MySQL from a reliable managed database into a differentiated, AI-ready operational database platform. The ideal candidate will combine strong product judgment, deep technical expertise in distributed systems and databases, and the rigorous operational standards required for managing mission-critical data services. The mandate is simple: make DigitalOcean Managed MySQL trusted for mission-critical workloads today and essential for AI-native builders tomorrow.

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