Staff Software Engineer

<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 looking for a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to join our Customer Observability/ Insights team. In this role, you’ll architect, build, and maintain large-scale distributed systems that power DigitalOcean’s Customer facing Observability ecosystem. You’ll collaborate across engineering, product, and design teams to deliver reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly solutions that help our teams monitor, measure, and optimize cloud infrastructure at scale.</p> <h2><strong>What You’ll Be Doing</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Architect, design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and systems.</li> <li>Drive technical initiatives and large cross-team projects from concept to production.</li> <li>Collaborate with product managers, UX designers, and engineers across distributed teams to deliver end-to-end solutions.</li> <li>Develop deep expertise in observability tools and technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, time-series databases, and distributed tracing.</li> <li>Build and maintain high-performance APIs and microservices using Go (Golang) and gRPC, integrating with systems like Kafka, Redis, and NoSQL databases.</li> <li>Work with Terraform and Ansible to automate infrastructure deployment and configuration management.</li> <li>Utilize knowledge of SQL for data analysis, service integration, and operational insights.</li> <li>Lead efforts in debugging, troubleshooting, and performance tuning of complex distributed systems.</li> <li>Champion operational excellence by improving reliability, monitoring, and alerting practices.</li> <li>Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to other engineers.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What You’ll Bring to DigitalOcean</strong></h2> <ul> <li>15+ years of relevant industry experience building and operating large-scale cloud services or distributed systems in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.</li> <li>Strong programming experience in Go (Golang) and deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals.</li> <li>Solid understanding of observability, monitoring, and alerting systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).</li> <li>Experience working with OTEL (OpenTelemetry) Collector, including instrumentation, data pipelines, and telemetry ingestion for metrics, logs, and traces.</li> <li>Proven experience designing and implementing scalable event-driven architectures using Kafka or similar technologies.</li> <li>Experience with gRPC, Terraform, and Ansible for service communication and infrastructure automation.</li> <li>Working knowledge of SQL, Redis, and NoSQL databases.</li> <li>Demonstrated ability to drive operational excellence and improve system reliability.</li> <li>Experience making pragmatic technical trade-offs while balancing short-term needs and long-term goals.</li> <li>Excellent communication and collaboration skills, especially with geographically distributed teams.</li> <li>Strong ownership mindset and the ability to independently deliver high-impact projects.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Nice to Have</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Experience with cloud-native environments (Kubernetes, Docker, microservices).</li> <li>Familiarity with time-series databases and distributed tracing frameworks.</li> <li>Prior experience building or maintaining observability platforms.</li> </ul> <h2>Compensation Range:</h2> <ul> <li>$191,000 - $239,000</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">*This is a remote role</span></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: ... (truncated, view full listing at source)