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.

Set a high bar for operational excellence

Define and execute against clear SLIs and SLOs for availability, failover, backup and restore, replication health, query performance, fleet safety, incident response, change management, and customer-visible reliability.

Deliver with high velocity and high quality

Create an execution culture that ships meaningful customer value quickly while maintaining service reliability. Improve roadmap predictability, reduce delivery friction, raise launch quality, and ensure the team can move fast without accumulating operational or architectural debt.

Lead relational database product engineering

Guide engineering decisions across replication, backup and restore, high availability, query performance, storage growth, scaling, upgrades, maintenance workflows, connection management, security, and observability.

Build a high-talent engineering organization

Hire, develop, and retain strong engineering talent. Build a team with clear ownership, high accountability, strong technical judgment, and a bias for action.

Partner across Product, SRE, Infrastructure, Support, Security, and GTM

Work closely with cross-functional partners to define the roadmap, understand customer needs, prioritize reliability investments, improve the support experience, drive adoption, and ensure the service is positioned effectively in the market.

What Success Looks Like

Within 12 months, success should look like:

• The managed database service is operating with clear SLOs, stronger reliability, fewer customer-impacting incidents, and better operational visibility.
• The team is shipping customer-facing improvements with higher velocity and better launch quality.
• Backup, restore, failover, scaling, upgrade, and maintenance workflows are safer, faster, and more predictable.
• The engineering organization has clear ownership, strong leaders, high talent density, and crisp accountability.
• Large customer workloads have better reference architectures, operational playbooks, escalation paths, and success patterns.
• DigitalOcean can credibly compete on simplicity, reliability, price-performance, and developer experience in managed relational databases.

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean:

Required Experience

• 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.

Preferred Experience

• 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.

Key Metrics

This leader will be accountable for metrics such as:

• Availability, failover success rate, RTO/RPO, backup success rate, restore time, and data durability.
• Fleet health, incident rate, change failure rate, mean time to detect, and mean time to recover.
• Query performance, replication lag, connection stability, scaling success rate, and upgrade success rate.
• Customer adoption, revenue growth, retention, support escalations, and large-customer success.
• Roadmap velocity, launch quality, engineering predictability, and operational debt reduction.
• Hiring quality, talent density, retention, manager effectiveness, and succession depth.

Why This Role Matters

Managed databases are among the most important services in any cloud platform. Customers depend on them to store critical data, run production applications, and scale their businesses. Reliability, performance, and operational trust are not optional; they are the product.

The reliability of this service depends on leadership judgment: the quality of architectural decisions, the strength of operational mechanisms, the bar for engineering talent, and the discipline to make the right tradeoffs before customers are impacted.

Our customer has a right to win by making managed databases simpler, more reliable, easier to operate, and better aligned to the needs of developers and growing businesses. This leader’s job is to build and operate a cloud database service that customers can trust for mission-critical workloads while creating an engineering organization that moves fast, raises the talent bar, and delivers with discipline.

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