Staff Customer Success Engineer - Database

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 are seeking an exceptional Staff Customer Success Engineer to join our Customer Success Engineering team at DigitalOcean. This is our highest individual contributor level within the Support organization, representing the pinnacle of technical expertise, customer advocacy, and strategic impact.

As an IC4, you will serve as the ultimate technical authority for our most complex customer challenges, leveraging deep database expertise, cloud infrastructure knowledge, and hands-on support skills to drive customer success, retention, and expansion.. You'll bridge the gap between deep support expertise and solutions architecture, supporting sophisticated cloud infrastructure solutions while maintaining the customer-first mentality that defines our Support organization. This role combines the architectural thinking of a Solutions Architect with the hands-on troubleshooting excellence and customer empathy expected from our Support team. You will also participate in an operational on-call rotation to support critical incidents and escalations.

Reporting to: Manager, CSE Support

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership & Expertise

• Serve as the ultimate escalation point for complex, business-critical database and cloud infrastructure issues, coordinating cross-functional responses that span Engineering, Product, and Operations.
• Architect enterprise-grade database solutions for customers operating large-scale workloads on DigitalOcean, including high-availability clusters, replication and sharding strategies, distributed database systems, and hybrid/multi-cloud deployments.
• Lead hands-on support for database and cloud infrastructure issues across MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka and OpenSearch, ensuring high availability, performance, and reliability for production workloads.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to our largest customers and strategic partners, building deep relationships with their technical teams and understanding their business objectives
• Analyze customer database and cloud architectures to identify performance bottlenecks, optimize configurations, and ensure best practices for scalability, security, and resiliency.
• Demonstrate strong understanding of database-specific requirements, including schema design, replication, performance optimization, and cloud-native compatibility.
• Build detailed infrastructure diagrams and explain architectural decisions clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Partner with Technical Account Managers, Solution Architects and Sales team to identify customer needs, define success plans, and ensure smooth migrations.
• Conduct hands-on technical workshops, troubleshooting sessions, and proofs-of-concept, guiding customers through complex cloud and database challenges.
• Act as a trusted advisor, helping customers navigate technical complexities, adopt database and cloud best practices, and optimize production workloads for performance, reliability, and operational efficiency.
• Prepare and document Database best practices to be used by the customers during and post-migration.
• Advocate for customer feedback to inform the development of new Database-related features and platform enhancements.

Organizational Leadership

• Mentor and develop IC1-IC3 engineers through structured coaching, technical reviews, pair troubleshooting sessions, and career development guidance
• Design and implement support frameworks including escalation workflows, troubleshooting methodologies, automation tools, and operational best practices that elevate team capabilities
• Create authoritative technical documentation including architectural reference guides, troubleshooting runbooks, customer-facing solution guides, and internal training curricula
• Lead critical incident response for platform-wide or high-impact customer issues, coordinating cross-functional war rooms and ensuring timely, effective resolution
• Represent the Support organization in cross-functional initiatives, product design reviews, and strategic planning sessions, ensuring the voice of the customer influences critical decisions

What You'll Add to DigitalOcean

Required Experience & Expertise

• Extensive professional experience in cloud infrastructure and database support, with a strong track record of resolving complex production issues in high-scale environments.
• Demonstrated expertise supporting mission-critical workloads across technologies such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and familiarity with complementary systems like Kafka and OpenSearch in cloud-native architectures.
• Strong foundational knowledge of Linux, distributed systems, networking and their application in cloud environments, with the ability to troubleshoot across the full stack (application → database → infrastructure).
• In-depth understanding of database architecture, including schema design, replication, sharding, backup and restore processes, and performance tuning for both SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Proven experience serving in a senior customer-facing technical role, technical consulting, or Database expert with a focus on solving complex technical challenges
• Passionate about delivering exceptional customer experiences and fostering customer success.
• Demonstrated track record of developing effective technical solutions to address customer business challenges.
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, technical support, or solutions engineering roles.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences.
• Highly motivated, with a proactive mindset and the ability to work independently and collaboratively.
• Strong automation mindset, with proven proficiency in programming or scripting languages (e.g., Python, Bash, Go) to streamline database operations, monitoring, configuration management, and performance optimization.

Bonus Points For

• Proven experience contributing to open-source projects, particularly in the database ecosystem (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB) or related technologies like Kafka, OpenSearch, or database migration tools.
• Advanced knowledge of cloud providers and tools (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and experience with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.
• Active participation in Databases or cloud-native communities, including meetups, conferences, or forums.
• Experience creating tools, plugins, or frameworks that enhance Database migrations or operational efficiency.
• Published articles, blogs, or documentation on Database best practices, migration strategies, or cloud-native solutions.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform, Helm, or Ansible.

Compensation Range:

• $110,400 - $138,000