Director of Engineering, Data Cloud Platform

DigitalOcean • Austin, TX

54d • Remote

About The Position

We are looking for a Director of Engineering, Data Cloud Platform who is passionate about building developer-friendly, scalable data infrastructure from the ground up. As a Director of Engineering, Data Cloud Platform at DigitalOcean, you will join a dynamic team dedicated to revolutionizing how developers and Digital Native Enterprises harness data. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will lead a growing engineering organization focused on delivering an open, scalable, and modern Data Cloud Platform. You will define the technical vision, architecture, and execution roadmap-driving innovation across data ingestion, analytics, observability, and AI/ML pipelines.

Requirements

• Experience: 10-15+ years in software or data engineering, including 5+ years managing managers and leading large-scale distributed systems. Proven background building data platforms or analytics systems used by thousands of customers.
• Technical Depth: Proficiency with Spark, Flink, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, Iceberg/Delta/Hudi, Trino/Presto, Kubernetes, S3-compatible object stores, and platforms like BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks. Strong foundation in distributed systems, data modeling, and compute/storage separation.
• Architectural Vision: Deep understanding of ELT/ETL frameworks, schema evolution, governance, and open data formats (Parquet, ORC, Avro). Experience designing multi-tenant, cloud-native systems.
• Leadership Skills: Proven ability to build and mentor distributed teams across geographies (U.S. and India preferred). Skilled in aligning vision, execution, and culture.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Ability to partner with product, AI/ML, platform, and go-to-market teams to define and deliver end-to-end data experiences.
• Customer Mindset: Passion for simplifying complex infrastructure and building self-serve, API-driven, and UI-based data products for developers and cloud-native businesses.
• Education: BS/MS in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent experience. Advanced coursework in distributed systems or data engineering preferred.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term product and technical strategy for DigitalOcean's Data Cloud Platform, integrating open-source tools like Apache Spark, Airflow, Iceberg, dbt with modern cloud data services.
• Architect and build core platform services including scalable data lakes, ingestion frameworks, ELT/ETL pipelines, distributed compute, governance, metadata management, and observability tooling.
• Drive engineering best practices across performance, scalability, and cost optimization for data workloads at petabyte scale.
• Build and lead a high-performing, globally distributed engineering team-including senior engineers, managers, cloud operators, and data infrastructure specialists.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, AI/ML, Platform, Storage, and GTM teams to ensure cohesive and powerful customer-facing data experiences.
• Partner with external vendors and internal stakeholders to evaluate integration and partnership opportunities with leading data ecosystem platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Glue).
• Champion engineering excellence and developer simplicity, reflecting the core ethos of DigitalOcean.

Benefits

• We prioritize career development.
• We care about your well-being.
• We reward our employees.
• The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills.
• You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance.
• We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Industry: Publishing Industries
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees