Staff Software Engineer - Storage

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. Scope and Mission: - Drive the design and operation of DigitalOcean's storage platform (block, object, and file/NFS), focusing on delivering durable, high-performance storage with best-in-class scale, performance, and predictability. - Drive architectural vision, technical excellence, and innovation across distributed storage systems, from the data plane to customer-facing APIs and experiences. Key Responsibilities: - Architect and Build - Design, develop, and ship storage capabilities across block, object, and file systems, spanning data placement, replication, snapshots, and observability. - Drive initiatives to deliver an architecture optimized for durability, scalability, low latency, high throughput, and cost efficiency. - Advance the storage platform with meaningful improvements to developer experience, infrastructure resilience, and platform capability. - 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 storage engineering teams. - Establish best practices for design, testing, deployments, instrumentation, and performance tuning. - 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 for storage. - Partner with compute, networking, and platform teams (e.g., Droplets, Kubernetes, MicroVMs), and guide customer-facing teams (e.g., support, solutions engineers) on storage architecture and best practices. - Reliability, Performance & Scaling - Lead Operational Excellence for the storage platform; establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while continuously raising the bar. - Oversee availability, durability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, data migration, and disaster recovery. - Drive automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring, fleet management) to optimize operations. - Innovation & Future Roadmapping - Champion the continuous improvement of the storage platform, identifying and executing on opportunities to make it faster, more durable, and more cost-efficient. - Serve as a subject matter expert on emerging storage technologies and paradigms (e.g., NVMe, distributed file systems, tiered storage) and lead their productization. - Build additional storage capabilities to support a broader range of workloads across DigitalOcean, including AI/ML and stateful compute. Qualifications: - Domain Expertise: Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade distributed storage systems (block, object, or file/NFS) at cloud scale. - Technical Experience: 8+ years designing and building applications on the cloud, with 4+ years in storage or distributed systems (e.g., Ceph, replication, consistency, and data durability). - Leadership & Collaboration: Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact. - Operational Excellence: Expertise in driving operational excellence via automation and best practices. - 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. *This job is located in Bengaluru, India JR: 2026-8378 #LI-Hybrid Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean - We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with a high-growth trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As part of our team, you’ll embody our "Shark" mindset: bold, ambitious, and scrappy. You'll lead with a bias for action and take true ownership of our products, customer success, and team culture. - We prioritize career development. At DigitalOcean, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will join a community of exceptional talent, collaborating closely with some of the brightest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance and fast-paced organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our talent development team prioritizes your professional development and provides resources to support your growth. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy. - We care about your well-being. We take a comprehensive approach to our total rewards packages because we know different things drive different people. Our benefits are designed to support you and may include flexible time off, local team meetups, and mental health and well being support. Our benefits philosophy is consistent globally, but specific benefits and eligibility vary by location to reflect local needs and regulations. - We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. Eligible employees may also receive equity compensation, which may include a new hire equity grant and, in participating countries, the opportunity to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program. Equity awards are subject to approval and the terms of the applicable plan. - Non-sales roles: In addition to base salary, this role is eligible to participate in DigitalOcean’s annual bonus plan and may be eligible for a new hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility. Bonus amounts depend on company and individual performance. - Sales roles (sales compensation eligible): In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible to earn incentive compensation under the applicable sales compensation plan and may be eligible for a new hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility. - DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.