Principal Software Engineer

DigitalOcean • Denver, CO

2d • Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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.
• Proven experience leading the design of large-scale services used by 1000s (or millions) of customers.
• Passion for mentoring and elevating those around you—technical leadership is about multiplying impact.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Benefits

• We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world.
• As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful sense of responsibility for customers, products, employees, and decisions.
• We prioritize career development. At DO, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing.
• We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education. All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
• We care about your well-being. Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
• 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.
• DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees