Principal Software Engineer PaaS - DigitalOcean

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.

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to drive the technical direction and architecture of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) at DigitalOcean . Our mission is to make deploying, scaling, and managing applications as simple and seamless as possible for developers around the world—from first deploy to internet scale.

As a Principal Engineer on the PaaS team, you’ll play a key role in designing and building the next generation of cloud-native services such as App Platform, Functions, and CI/CD. You’ll architect systems that power our global infrastructure, partner closely with engineering and product teams across the company, and mentor engineers to level up the entire organization. This is a unique opportunity to shape how developers build and ship software on a platform purpose-built for simplicity and scale.

We’re looking for someone who can span technical strategy and hands-on execution—someone who thrives on solving complex distributed problems and multiplying the impact of everyone around them.

What You’ll Do:

• Architect and guide the implementation of high-scale, reliable, and secure systems that underpin our PaaS offerings.
• Drive technical direction and make foundational decisions on system design, scalability, observability, and developer experience.
• Partner with product managers and engineering leadership to define short- and long-term roadmap priorities.
• Identify platform bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and future risks—and design solutions that proactively address them.
• Collaborate across teams to ensure seamless integration between platform services, infrastructure, and developer tools.
• Mentor engineers at all levels and contribute to a culture of technical excellence, inclusivity, and impact.
• Stay ahead of emerging technologies, patterns, and best practices in the PaaS, serverless, and cloud-native ecosystem.

Key Metrics:

• Platform availability and system performance
• Developer adoption and satisfaction
• Technical debt reduction and architectural clarity
• Engineering velocity and cross-team alignment

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean :

• 11+ years of experience designing and building distributed systems at scale.
• Expertise in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, C++, Java) and strong fundamentals in systems architecture and infrastructure.