Staff Customer Success Engineer - Database

<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>We are seeking an exceptional <strong>Staff Customer Success Engineer</strong> to join our Customer Success Engineering team at DigitalOcean. This is our highest individual contributor level within the Support organization, representing the pinnacle of technical expertise, customer advocacy, and strategic impact.</p> <p>As an IC4, you will serve as the ultimate technical authority for our most complex customer challenges, leveraging <strong>deep database expertise, cloud infrastructure knowledge, and hands-on support skills</strong> to drive customer success, retention, and expansion.. You'll bridge the gap between deep support expertise and solutions architecture, supporting sophisticated cloud infrastructure solutions while maintaining the customer-first mentality that defines our Support organization. This role combines the architectural thinking of a Solutions Architect with the hands-on troubleshooting excellence and customer empathy expected from our Support team. You will also participate in an <strong>operational on-call rotation</strong> to support critical incidents and escalations.</p> <p><strong>Reporting to:</strong> Manager, CSE Support</p> <h2><strong>What You'll Do</strong></h2> <h3><strong>Technical Leadership Expertise</strong></h3> <ul> <li><strong>Serve as the ultimate escalation point</strong> for complex, business-critical <strong>database and cloud infrastructure issues</strong>, coordinating cross-functional responses that span Engineering, Product, and Operations.</li> <li><strong>Architect enterprise-grade database solutions</strong> for customers operating large-scale workloads on DigitalOcean, including high-availability clusters, replication and sharding strategies, distributed database systems, and hybrid/multi-cloud deployments.</li> <li><strong>Lead hands-on support for database and cloud infrastructure issues </strong>across <strong>MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka and OpenSearch</strong>, ensuring high availability, performance, and reliability for production workloads.</li> <li><strong>Act as a trusted technical advisor</strong> to our largest customers and strategic partners, building deep relationships with their technical teams and understanding their business objectives</li> <li>Analyze customer database and cloud architectures to <strong>identify performance bottlenecks, optimize configurations, and ensure best practices</strong> for scalability, security, and resiliency.</li> <li>Demonstrate strong understanding of database-specific requirements, including schema design, replication, performance optimization, and cloud-native compatibility.</li> <li>Build detailed infrastructure diagrams and explain architectural decisions clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.</li> <li>Partner with Technical Account Managers, Solution Architects and Sales team to identify customer needs, define success plans, and ensure smooth migrations.</li> <li>Conduct <strong>hands-on technical workshops, troubleshooting sessions, and proofs-of-concept</strong>, guiding customers through complex cloud and database challenges.</li> <li>Act as a <strong>trusted advisor</strong>, helping customers navigate technical complexities, adopt database and cloud best practices, and optimize production workloads for performance, reliability, and operational efficiency.</li> <li>Prepare and document Database best practices to be used by the customers during and post-migration.</li> <li> ... (truncated, view full listing at source)