Senior Customer Success Engineer I - Kubernetes

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 are looking for a Senior Customer Success Engineer I – Kubernetes who is passionate about cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, and delivering exceptional customer experiences, while providing high-touch, white-glove support to strategic accounts. As a Senior Customer Success Engineer I at DigitalOcean, you will play a critical role in supporting and empowering customers to successfully run production workloads on Kubernetes. You will work closely with customers to troubleshoot complex issues, optimize cluster performance, and guide them in adopting best practices across Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures. In this role, you will bring deep technical expertise in Kubernetes and act as an escalation point for complex, business-critical customer scenarios. You will collaborate cross-functionally with Product and Engineering to drive customer outcomes, influence platform improvements, and mentor junior engineers. This role reports to the Manager, Customer Success Engineer. What You'll Do Deliver advanced technical support for Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, including cluster provisioning, container products, networking, scaling, workload orchestration, and container registry. Troubleshoot complex production issues affecting cluster performance, pod scheduling, ingress, storage, and security Guide strategic customers through onboarding, migrations, and adoption of Kubernetes, helping them design scalable, resilient, and secure architectures while ensuring smooth production readiness and resolving complex escalations. Serve as the escalation point for high-impact and business-critical Kubernetes issues, driving resolution through coordination with Engineering, and Product teams Guide customers in designing scalable, resilient, and secure Kubernetes architectures on DigitalOcean Mentor IC1/IC2 engineers and drive team growth by contributing to documentation, playbooks, and leverage automation tools to optimize workflows and knowledge sharing Partner cross-functionally with leadership, Product, and Engineering to shape support strategy, feature needs, and best practices for Managed Kubernetes. Use observability and monitoring tools to diagnose system behavior and performance bottlenecks Key Metrics Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Time to Resolution / SLA adherence Escalation quality and resolution effectiveness Documentation and knowledge base contributions Customer adoption of best practices What You'll Add to DigitalOcean Required Experience & skills 4–7+ years of experience in technical support, SRE, DevOps, or cloud engineering roles Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with hands-on expertise in managing and troubleshooting production clusters. Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes (cluster management, deployments, troubleshooting) in production environments Deep understanding of Kubernetes components (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager, kubelet.) Solid foundation in Linux systems, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems Strong knowledge of networking concepts including Kubernetes networking, ingress controllers, load balancing, and storage solutions (persistent volumes, CSI drivers) Expertise in troubleshooting across application, container, and infrastructure layers Customer-first mindset with the ability to manage high-pressure, business-critical situations and delivering great support experiences Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly Ability to…