Software Engineer II (Machine Configuration)

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 systems engineer who is comfortable working remotely. You will report to the Engineering Manager of the Machines::Configuration team, and act as a contributor to the team’s various missions:

OS: Maintain DigitalOcean’s internal Ubuntu images + package archives

Chef: Help maintain and support DigitalOcean’s internal Chef ecosystem

Service Deployment: Help design new ways to deploy services quickly and safely to infrastructure systems using Nomad

Automated Maintenance: Help automate server maintenance using StackStorm, AWX, and Python

In addition to driving our primary missions forward, we do a lot of odd jobs. For example:

• We support other teams who build deb packages with our packaging expertise
• We help other teams produce GPU images by leaning on our imaging expertise
• We roll updates out to our entire fleet every quarter
• We maintain patched versions of system software, when necessary, and contribute those patches upstream where possible
• We participate in hack-a-thons and produce many important emojis

Our team has a big scope, but don’t let it deter you - we’re a group of kind folks. 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 Chef expertise. If you have Chef experience, that’s a bonus!

DigitalOcean’s Internal Culture and Tooling:

DigitalOcean teams communicate primarily via Slack. Machines::Configuration 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 can expect to be on-call periodically once you are ready, but shouldn’t expect to be paged often.

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 Machines::Configuration group is an arm of the Infra::Fleet organization. We are aimed at boosting productivity by enabling our engineers to rapidly and reliably deliver software and configuration running on our infrastructure, while keeping our fleet homogenous. The Infra::Fleet group, supported by the Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering, is made up of a diverse group of nearly sixty engineers located across the US, Canada, and Europe.

The Machines::Configuration group accounts for approximately 10% of the Infra::Fleet group. Within Machines::Configuration, 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 and testing code, and deploying it from staging to production
• 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

For example, here are some things we’ve spent our time on in the past few years:

• Developed a new internal system that fully automated the reprovisioning of hypervisors
• Developed a new internal tool to generate a minimal Ubuntu image from scratch
• Wrote and upstreamed patches