Senior Software Engineer I (Resiliency: Maintenance)

Do you ever wonder what happens inside the cloud?

DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN) simplifies cloud computing so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. With our mission-critical infrastructure and fully managed offerings, DigitalOcean enables startups and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to rapidly deploy and scale modern applications. As a remote-first organization, our employees, like our customers, are based around the world.

We want people who are passionate about designing and operating secure systems at scale.

We are looking for an experienced, motivated, adaptable, empathetic engineer who is comfortable working remotely. You will report to the Engineering Manager of the Maintenance team, and act as a contributor to the team’s mission. The Maintenance Mission is to improve cloud reliability, efficiency, and scalability by driving throughput via automation and optimization of flow through our bottlenecks.

Consider applying for this job if you enjoy:

• Automating cumbersome processes
• Digging deep to understand the true causes of bottlenecks
• Making complex automation systems easier for other engineers to use and understand
• Automating things for fun - writing deployment scripts for your homelab, or automating your lights using Home Assistant

More than anything, we’re looking for someone empathetic, motivated, and driven to grow with us.

Also, we’re looking to expand our team’s expertise in driving operational flow. The ability to help identify bottlenecks and optimize throughput will be extremely valuable for this role.

DigitalOcean’s Internal Culture and Tooling

DigitalOcean teams communicate primarily via Slack. The Maintenance team makes light use of Jira and GSuite. We strive to make our work-life balance comfortable, and aim to scope work appropriately so that everyone works at a healthy pace. You might expect to be on-call periodically, depending on the approach the team decides to take.

DigitalOcean’s observability platform comprises Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and Elasticsearch. Knowing any of these tools is a bonus, because every service at DO is generally expected to use this platform.

The Maintenance team exists within the Resiliency division, an arm of the Infrastructure department. We are aimed at driving high throughput of maintenance operations and minimal impact to customer availability. The Resiliency division is made up of a diverse group of nearly 40 engineers located across the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe.

The Maintenance team is a new mission within DO and will be made up of roughly 8 engineers with various skill sets and backgrounds. Within Resiliency, there are growth opportunities along several tracks (i.e. Tech Leader, Subject Matter Expert (SME), Project Management, Engineering Manager, etc).

What You’ll Be Doing:

As an engineer, you will spend your day-to-day on:

• Writing maintenance automation leveraging StackStorm, Ansible, and Python
• Identifying and removing bottlenecks (where feasible)
• Optimizing the throughput of constrained systems
• Partnering closely with other engineering and operations teams to improve fleet health
• Participating in large multi-quarter projects and efforts
• Demonstrating your amazing work to tons of lovely engineers
• Participating in our work prioritization processes
• Responding to Slack messages & keeping up with various streams of conversation, including triaging user support requests
• Participating in company-wide hackathons
• Spending 5-20% of your time on innovation, education, or open source projects

As the team is just starting to come together, these are a few areas of initial focus:

• Defining what strategies the Maintenance team will adopt to drive our mission
• Working directly with operational teams to learn about the processes they follow to inform automation priorities
• Developing insights into fleet health and how it impacts customer experience
• Driving throughput for existing operational automation
• Communicating effectively across teams and orgs

What We’ll Expect From You:

NB: If you don’t meet all of the expectations below, that’s okay! Submit an application, and be sure to include a cover letter telling us why you’d be a good fit for our team.

• Significant experience driving positive outcomes via cross-functional engagement
• Significant experience using or administering Linux systems
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