Principal Engineer (Managed Database Services)

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.

Key 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.

Qualifications:

• 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:

• $198,000 - $297,000