Staff Software Engineer - Storage

Scope and Mission:

• Drive the design and operation of DigitalOcean's storage platform (block, object, and file/NFS), focusing on delivering durable, high-performance storage with best-in-class scale, performance, and predictability.
• Drive architectural vision, technical excellence, and innovation across distributed storage systems, from the data plane to customer-facing APIs and experiences.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and Build
• Design, develop, and ship storage capabilities across block, object, and file systems, spanning data placement, replication, snapshots, and observability.
• Drive initiatives to deliver an architecture optimized for durability, scalability, low latency, high throughput, and cost efficiency.
• Advance the storage platform with meaningful improvements to developer experience, infrastructure resilience, and platform capability.
• Roll out new services by taking on a hands-on lead role as required to ensure timely delivery.
• Technical Leadership
• Establish and enforce technical standards, coding practices, tooling, and infrastructure guidelines across the storage engineering teams.
• Establish best practices for design, testing, deployments, instrumentation, and performance tuning.
• Mentor other senior engineers, shaping the team's culture of architectural rigor and operational excellence.
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Work with product managers, stakeholders, and business leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable technical roadmaps for storage.
• Partner with compute, networking, and platform teams (e.g., Droplets, Kubernetes, MicroVMs), and guide customer-facing teams (e.g., support, solutions engineers) on storage architecture and best practices.
• Reliability, Performance & Scaling
• Lead Operational Excellence for the storage platform; establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while continuously raising the bar.
• Oversee availability, durability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, data migration, and disaster recovery.
• Drive automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring, fleet management) to optimize operations.
• Innovation & Future Roadmapping
• Champion the continuous improvement of the storage platform, identifying and executing on opportunities to make it faster, more durable, and more cost-efficient.
• Serve as a subject matter expert on emerging storage technologies and paradigms (e.g., NVMe, distributed file systems, tiered storage) and lead their productization.
• Build additional storage capabilities to support a broader range of workloads across DigitalOcean, including AI/ML and stateful compute.

Qualifications:

• Domain Expertise: Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade distributed storage systems (block, object, or file/NFS) at cloud scale.
• Technical Experience: 8+ years designing and building applications on the cloud, with 4+ years in storage or distributed systems (e.g., Ceph, replication, consistency, and data durability).
• Leadership & Collaboration: Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact.
• Operational Excellence: Expertise in driving operational excellence via automation and best practices.
• Communication & Mentoring: Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring senior and junior engineers; translating complex concepts across engineering and business teams.

*This job is located in Bengaluru, India

JR: 2026-8378

#LI-Hybrid