Principal Engineer (Managed Database Services)

DigitalOcean is a cutting-edge technology company focused on simplifying cloud services for developers. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the design and operation of scalable database platforms, ensuring high availability and performance while mentoring engineering teams.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Research and integrate advanced capabilities (e.g., AI‑assisted tooling, MCP protocols) to enhance developer workflows and metadata accessibility across database types

Requirements:

• ≥ 12–15 years in distributed systems architecture, database internals (storage, indexing, query optimizers), and cloud infrastructure
• Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade systems on one or more database services in the Cloud
• Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and observability frameworks
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring senior and junior engineers; translating complex concepts across engineering and business teams