Principal Engineer (Managed Database Services)

<div class="content-intro"><p>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. </p></div><p>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.</p> <h2>Key Responsibilities:</h2> <ul> <li><strong>Architect and Build</strong></li> <ul> <li>Design and evolve the architecture of large-scale distributed database systems optimized for scalability, reliability, low-latency, and cost efficiency.</li> <li>Architect solutions for storage engines, indexing, querying, caching, replication, and high availability, drawing from best practices in both relational and NoSQL paradigms.</li> <li>Roll out new services by taking on a hands-on lead role as required to ensure timely delivery </li> </ul> <li><strong>Technical Leadership</strong></li> <ul> <li>Establish and enforce technical standards, coding practices, tooling, and infrastructure guidelines across the database engineering teams.</li> <li>Mentor other senior engineers, shaping the team’s culture of architectural rigor and operational excellence.</li> </ul> <li><strong>Cross-functional Collaboration</strong></li> <ul> <li>Work with product managers, stakeholders, and business leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable technical roadmaps.</li> <li>Guide customer-facing teams (e.g., consultants, support, sales engineers) to define database solutions and migration strategies aligned with organizational goals</li> </ul> <li><strong>Reliability, Performance Scaling</strong></li> <ul> <li>Lead Operations Excellence for database services, establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while raising the bar </li> <li>Oversee availability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, and disaster recovery for database platforms.</li> <li>Drive automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring) to optimize operations</li> </ul> <li><strong>Innovation Future Roadmapping</strong></li> <ul> <li>Research and integrate advanced capabilities (e.g., AI‑assisted tooling, MCP protocols) to enhance developer workflows and metadata accessibility across database types.</li> </ul> </ul> <h2>Qualifications:</h2> <ul> <li><strong>Technical Experience:</strong> ≥ 12–15 years in distributed systems architecture, database internals (storage, indexing, query optimizers), and cloud infrastructure.</li> <li><strong>Domain Expertise:</strong> Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade systems on one or more database services in the Cloud.</li> <li><strong>Leadership Collaboration:</strong> Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact.</li> <li><strong>Automation Proficiency:</strong> Familiarity with infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and observability frameworks.</li> <li><strong>Communication Mentoring:</strong> Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring senior and junior engineers; translating complex concepts across engineering and business teams.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Compensation Range: </strong></h2> <ul> <li>$198,000 - $297,000</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;" ... (truncated, view full listing at source)