Senior Software Engineer I

About the Job

Embark on a career-defining journey at DigitalOcean, joining a vibrant community of top talent dedicated to building the simplest scalable cloud. If you possess a growth mindset, a penchant for bold, big-picture thinking, and thrive in the dynamic environment of an industry disruptor, you'll find your place here. We champion collaboration, continuous learning, enjoyment, and making a significant impact for dreamers and builders worldwide.

Position Overview: We are seeking an engineer to spearhead the development and support of current and future large-scale storage platforms, with a strong emphasis on Network File System (NFS) and scalable file storage solutions.

The Storage Team is responsible for the operations and development of block volumes, backups, image management, object storage, and scalable file systems like NFS. Our objective is to establish a unified interface for hypervisor storage, abstracting storage class placement decisions from the hypervisor client and leveraging the full spectrum of block and file storage classes to best meet customer needs.

The chosen candidate will have the chance to make substantial contributions to key software initiatives, engage with the open-source community, and tackle complex challenges at cloud scale.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain scalable NFS solutions and distributed file systems.
• Support the creation and operation of distributed systems at scale.
• Program in Go and other languages to develop high-performance storage solutions.
• Collaborate with a motivated team to architect, develop, and optimize storage services.
• Contribute to and consume from free/open-source software communities, particularly in file storage.
• Solve complex, large-scale problems in a technically rewarding environment.

Key Metrics

• Service availability (SLO/SLA): Monthly uptime for control and data planes (e.g., control plane ≥99.9%, data plane ≥99.95%); reported monthly.
• Mean time to detect / recover (MTTD / MTTR): Median detection and recovery times for Sev-1/Sev-2 incidents; tracked quarterly.
• Incident volume & change-failure rate: Number of incidents by severity and percentage of releases causing rollbacks or incidents; tracked per release and monthly.
• Customer adoption & usage growth: Growth in active NFS customers, number of active mounts/clients, and total provisioned capacity (GiB/TiB) — measured QoQ.
• Operational efficiency / automation: Reduction in manual operations (on-call time, manual runbooks, toil) measured as a % decrease in operational tickets or hours.
• Feature delivery: % of planned milestones delivered on time and meeting acceptance criteria.

What You’ll Add To DigitalOcean

• Deep knowledge of NFS, scalable file systems, and distributed storage architectures.
• Experience designing, deploying, and operating highly available file storage solutions.
• Familiarity with Object Storage and distributed File Systems, and methods for scaling them.
• Expertise in concurrency/parallelism models in modern programming languages like Go.
• A passion for open-source contributions and collaboration within the storage community.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong systems software background with experience in designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed file/storage systems (NFS or equivalent).
• Proficiency in Go and familiarity with other systems languages used in the stack.
• Experience integrating storage with Kubernetes (CSI, operators) and building/operating cloud-native storage services.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, test automation, and release engineering, focusing on developer experience, safe rollouts (canary/gradual), and reducing manual intervention.
• Proven track record of troubleshooting performance/scale issues and owning on-call/incident response.
• Familiarity with observability tooling (metrics, tracing, logging) and production SLOs.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects and writing technical documentation or blog posts.

Bonus Points

• Experience with gRPC, Ceph or other distributed data stores, storage networking (NVMe/TCP, RDMA), or storage hardware tuning.
• Familiarity with multi-protocol storage systems supporting both block and file storage.

This job is located in Hyderabad, India.

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

• Innovate with purpose: Be part of a cutting-edge technology company with a strong growth trajectory, dedicated to simplifying cloud and AI so builders can focus on creating world-changing software. As a Shark, you'll think big, bold, and scrappy, acting as an owner with a bias for action and a deep sense of responsibility towards customers, products, employees, and decisions.
• Prioritize career development: At DO, you'll do your best work alongside some of the industry's brightest minds. We are a high-performance organization that consistently challenges you to think bigger. Our organizational development team offers resources for continuous growth, including reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, along with access to LinkedIn Learning's extensive course library.
• Care about your well-being: We provide a competitive array of benefits globally to support your well-being, including an Employee Assistance Program, local employee meetups, and a flexible time-off policy. Specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
• Reward our employees: The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant experience, and skills. You may be eligible for a bonus based on company and individual performance. We also offer equity compensation, including grants upon hire and participation in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.

DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and 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.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.