Director of Engineering, Managed Database Service

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 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, In…