Principal Engineer (Managed Database Services)

Responsibilities

• Architect and Build
• Design and evolve the architecture of large-scale distributed database systems optimized for scalability, reliability, low-latency, and cost efficiency.
• Architect solutions for storage engines, indexing, querying, caching, replication, and high availability, drawing from best practices in both relational and NoSQL paradigms.
• Roll out new services by taking on a hands-on lead role as required to ensure timely delivery
• Technical Leadership
• Establish and enforce technical standards, coding practices, tooling, and infrastructure guidelines across the database engineering teams.
• Mentor other senior engineers, shaping the team's culture of architectural rigor and operational excellence.
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Work with product managers, stakeholders, and business leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable technical roadmaps.
• Guide customer-facing teams (e.g., consultants, support, sales engineers) to define database solutions and migration strategies aligned with organizational goals
• Reliability, Performance & Scaling
• Lead Operations Excellence for database services, establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while raising the bar
• Oversee availability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, and disaster recovery for database platforms.
• Drive automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring) to optimize operations
• Innovation & Future Roadmapping
• Research and integrate advanced capabilities (e.g., AI‑assisted tooling, MCP protocols) to enhance developer workflows and metadata accessibility across database types.

Requirements

• Technical Experience: ≥ 12-15 years in distributed systems architecture, database internals (storage, indexing, query optimizers), and cloud infrastructure.
• Domain Expertise: Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade systems on one or more database services in the Cloud.
• Leadership & Collaboration: Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact.
• Automation Proficiency: Familiarity with infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and observability frameworks.
• Communication & Mentoring: Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring senior and junior engineers; translating complex concepts across engineering and business teams.
• Compensation Range:
• $247,680 - $371,520
• *This is a remote role
• #LI-Remote
• #LI-SK1
• Why You'll Like Working for DigitalOcean
• We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of exp

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. As a Principal Engineer you'll spearhead the design, development, and operation of scalable, high‑availability, and high-performance database platforms across relational and non-relational managed services (Managed MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, etc.) and scale-out variants that scale to petabytes of data. Drive architectural vision, technical excellence, and innovation across both backend systems and customer-facing interactions.

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