Sr. Director of Engineering, Managed PostgreSQL and AI-Native Database Platform

DigitalOcean•Seattle, WA

13d•Hybrid

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead its Managed PostgreSQL organization. This leader will be responsible for the strategy, architecture, reliability, scalability, and long-term evolution of their PostgreSQL offerings and next-generation capabilities for AI-native applications. The ideal candidate will combine product vision with technical expertise in distributed systems and database management operations. The goal is to make DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL a trusted solution for mission-critical workloads today and an essential platform for AI builders tomorrow.

Requirements

15+ years of engineering experience, including significant leadership of cloud infrastructure, database, storage, distributed systems, or data platform organizations.
6+ years managing managers and leading multi-team engineering organizations.
Proven experience operating customer-facing, high-availability production services with strict reliability, durability, and incident-management expectations.
Strong distributed systems foundation: replication, consensus, failure detection, failover, consistency, partitioning, control planes, fleet automation, and multi-tenant operations.
Experience with database systems, managed database services, storage engines, query performance, backup/restore, high availability, or large-scale stateful infrastructure.
Demonstrated ability to define multi-quarter technical strategy and convert it into shipped customer value.
Strong customer judgment: ability to understand enterprise-grade workload requirements and separate real customer needs from noisy feature requests.
Executive communication skills; able to represent the business and technical strategy to senior leadership, customers, partners, and GTM teams.

Nice To Haves

Deep PostgreSQL experience, especially operating PostgreSQL at scale.
Experience with RDS/Aurora, AlloyDB, Cloud SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Neon, Crunchy, EDB, Yugabyte, Citus, Timescale, Supabase, or similar PostgreSQL ecosystems.
Experience building or operating HA architectures using proxies, connection poolers, consensus systems, automated primary election, online upgrades, and backup/restore pipelines.
Familiarity with pgvector, pgvectorscale, hybrid search, RAG architectures, AI application data patterns, and agent memory/state systems.
Experience scaling databases beyond single-node limits through read scaling, sharding, distributed SQL, storage/compute separation, or workload-aware architecture.
Experience partnering with product and GTM teams to turn platform capabilities into compelling commercial offerings.
Open-source credibility or strong familiarity with the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Own Managed PostgreSQL end-to-end, overseeing all PostgreSQL editions, including availability, scalability, security, and long-term architecture.
Build hyperscaler-grade reliability and operational excellence, establishing tier-0 reliability standards and executing against SLIs/SLOs for failover, backups, and query performance.
Scale Advanced Edition into a production-grade platform with HA architecture, consensus-based failover, and fast restore capabilities.
Support large-scale workloads (up to 64 TB) with storage scaling, read-only nodes, and query insights.
Define the AI-native PostgreSQL strategy, integrating PostgreSQL with AI workflows via pgvector, metadata stores, and agent memory.
Build and scale a high-performing global engineering organization with strong accountability and technical review mechanisms.
Translate customer needs, competitive gaps, and market shifts into a coherent engineering roadmap.
Work closely with Product and GTM teams to define packaging, migration, enterprise readiness, roadmap sequencing, launch quality, and customer adoption.
Raise the technical bar by being credible in architecture discussions, challenging designs, evaluating tradeoffs, simplifying complexity, and preventing reliability debt.