Director, Field & Event Marketing

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 Director of Field & Event Marketing to own how DigitalOcean shows up in the world. Reporting to the Head of Marketing, you'll define and drive our global event strategy and operating model, with a major focus on San Francisco and the Bay Area. This role will span the full event mix, from our flagship DigitalOcean Deploy conference to creative startup events that engage founders and VCs, and priority AI industry events, hands-on hackathons and workshops, customer programs, and everything in between. This isn't a logistics role and it isn’t about running a vanilla B2B event playbook. We're looking for a strategic marketing leader who knows how to execute what works, but is also willing to test new formats, find what actually interests our target audience, create memorable experiences, and highlight the customers building on DigitalOcean. You are the bridge between creative vision and commercial outcomes, turning every event into a moment that drives pipeline, customer engagement, technical credibility, and market leadership while ensuring every initiative drives measurable results. What You’ll Do: Own DigitalOcean’s global event strategy across first-party, third-party, and field programs, from our flagship event, DigitalOcean Deploy, to founder dinners and AI industry conferences. Lead DigitalOcean’s presence at priority third-party events to drive brand awareness, technical credibility, and pipeline. Build a differentiated event strategy that balances proven formats with new ideas, experimental activations, customer showcases, guerrilla marketing tactics, and creative ways to engage AI builders and leaders. Partner with Sales, Product Marketing, Product, and Growth in order to align event investments with target accounts, pipeline tracking, and business goals. Design unique, high-quality attendee experiences that combine strong programming, technical depth, hands-on engagement, customer stories, creative concepts and smooth execution Build and scale the "Event Operating Model" in order to move fast, including planning processes, timelines, budget management, KPIs, and repeatable playbooks. Identify and secure technical speaking opportunities for our leaders in order to establish DigitalOcean as the credible home for production-grade AI inference. Build a vendor network and “event-in-a-box” program needed to elevate and scale repeatable, on-brand experiences across first and third-party events . Own the end-to-end event experience, including registration, event pages, attendee communications, livestreaming, on-site execution, follow-up, and reporting. Hire, lead, and develop a high-performing event marketing team . What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean: 10+ years of B2B event marketing experience, ideally in cloud, AI, SaaS, or developer tools, with strong fluency in marketing to founders and technical audiences. Experience producing first-party events (from intimate to 5k+ attendees) and managing third-party sponsorships (30k+ attendees), from executive dinners and meetups to large-scale conferences. Experience creating a wide range of event formats, including flagship conferences, industry events, hands-on workshops, hackathons, customer programs, startup events, founder dinners, and executive experiences. A creative, experimental mindset: you know how to execute what works, but you also push beyond default formats to test new ideas, create standout experiences, and find what genuinely interests the audience. Owner-operator mindse…