Staff Hardware Engineer

DigitalOcean•Seattle, WA

4h•$191,000 - $239,000•Hybrid

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 want people who are passionate about optimizing and troubleshooting data center hardware at mega-scale so our customers don’t have to worry! We are looking for a well-rounded hardware technologist who lives and breathes data center metal. Reporting to the Manager of Infra::Machines::Design, the Senior Design Infrastructure Engineer will build and scale hardware automation across DigitalOcean products and components and join a team of engineers who have already paved the way for the many tens of thousands of servers in our infrastructure. The ideal candidate will be eager to face new challenges as DigitalOcean continues to scale its data center footprint and explore new technologies to bring to our customers.

Requirements

Technical Degree (BS Computer Science/Engineering) or equivalent practical experience
Strong understanding of x86 server hardware architecture and subsystems. Ideally, you’ve worked with non-x86 hardware too!
Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and maintaining liquid-cooled server solutions in datacenter environments
Demonstrated professional proficiency in configuration management best-practices (we use Ansible and Chef)
Experience automating server components at large-scale using industry-standard tooling (Redfish, IPMI, etc) including a deep understanding of benchmarking, automating test frameworks, and process automation in general
Practical knowledge of PXE boot, UEFI, Linux/OS boot, AMI/OEM BIOS distributions, OpenBMC/AMI/OEM BMC implementations, RAID and other storage resiliency technologies, and the full Network stack- from NIC firmware to TCP/IP
Adept at Linux (or Unix) operating systems. You’ll be spending a lot of time working in one!
Comfortable with version control systems (we use Git) and proficient in at least one programming language (such as Python or Go)
Ability to participate in 24/7 on-call rotation with other members of the team
Excellent communication skills, both within the team and with the broader company
Have an insatiable passion for hardware, both new and old

Responsibilities

Lead projects with internal stakeholders to gather product requirements for hardware designs to meet the DigitalOcean mission
Lead projects with vendors on specifying, qualifying, onboarding, and delivering new hardware to the DigitalOcean ecosystem
Work on the development and execution of a hardware development roadmap to support product requirements
Partner with peer teams to develop tools and processes to orchestrate scaling of the hardware platform
Lead projects on internal roadmap to improve team-owned services for both internal stakeholders and customers
Act as Tier 3 escalation on-call for triage, investigation, and resolution of system hardware issues in the DigitalOcean fleet (both customer-facing and internal)
Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation with other members of the team
Improve existing firmware and hardware configuration automation/validation, for both hardware platforms and components (such as NIC, Storage and BMC)
Engage with hardware vendors about new automation features and existing bugs
Mentor other DigitalOcean employees on configuration management best practices, troubleshooting intuition, hardware design, and clean documentation