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

DigitalOcean•Seattle, WA

14d•$261,600 - $327,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead DigitalOcean’s Managed PostgreSQL organization. This leader will own the strategy, architecture, reliability, scalability and long-term evolution of our PostgreSQL offerings and the next generation capabilities that enable developers to build highly scalable, data-intensive, and AI-native applications. The ideal candidate will merge sophisticated product vision with technical expertise in distributed systems and the rigorous operational standards required for database management. Your mandate is simple: make DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL trusted for mission-critical workloads today, and essential for AI-native 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
Lead the organization responsible for all PostgreSQL editions, overseeing availability, scalability, security, and long-term architecture.
Build hyperscaler-grade reliability and operational excellence
Establish tier-0 reliability standards. Execute against SLIs/SLOs for failover, backups, and query performance to ensure a high bar for operational excellence.
Scale Advanced Edition into a production-grade platform
Evolve the Advanced Edition into a differentiated offering featuring HA architecture, consensus-based failover, and fast restore capabilities.
Serve large and demanding database customers
Support large-scale workloads (up to 64 TB) with storage scaling, read-only nodes, and query insights to meet demanding customer needs.
Define the AI-native PostgreSQL strategy
Integrate PostgreSQL with AI workflows via pgvector, metadata stores, and agent memory, positioning it as the core substrate for AI builders.
Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization
Build a high-performing global organization with strong accountability and technical review mechanisms.
Partner deeply across Product, GTM, Support, SRE, Infrastructure, and AI/Data teams
Translate customer needs, competitive gaps, and market shifts into a coherent engineering roadmap. Work closely with Product and GTM to define packaging, migration motions, enterprise readiness, roadmap sequencing, launch quality, and customer adoption.
Raise the technical bar
Be credible in architecture discussions with principal engineers and senior database experts. The role requires enough depth to challenge designs, evaluate tradeoffs, simplify complexity, and prevent the organization from accumulating reliability debt under the cover of roadmap velocity.