Principal Software Engineer (PaaS)

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’re looking for a Principal Engineer to drive the technical direction and architecture of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) at DigitalOcean. Our mission is to make deploying, scaling, and managing applications as simple and seamless as possible for developers around the world—from first deploy to internet scale.

As a Principal Engineer on the PaaS team, you’ll play a key role in designing and building the next generation of cloud-native services such as App Platform, Functions, and CI/CD. You’ll architect systems that power our global infrastructure, partner closely with engineering and product teams across the company, and mentor engineers to level up the entire organization. This is a unique opportunity to shape how developers build and ship software on a platform purpose-built for simplicity and scale.

We’re looking for someone who can span technical strategy and hands-on execution—someone who thrives on solving complex distributed problems and multiplying the impact of everyone around them.

What You’ll Do:

• Architect and guide the implementation of high-scale, reliable, and secure systems that underpin our PaaS offerings.
• Drive technical direction and make foundational decisions on system design, scalability, observability, and developer experience.
• Partner with product managers and engineering leadership to define short- and long-term roadmap priorities.
• Identify platform bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and future risks—and design solutions that proactively address them.
• Collaborate across teams to ensure seamless integration between platform services, infrastructure, and developer tools.
• Mentor engineers at all levels and contribute to a culture of technical excellence, inclusivity, and impact.
• Stay ahead of emerging technologies, patterns, and best practices in the PaaS, serverless, and cloud-native ecosystem.

Key Metrics:

• Platform availability and system performance
• Developer adoption and satisfaction
• Technical debt reduction and architectural clarity
• Engineering velocity and cross-team alignment

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean:

• 11+ years of experience designing and building distributed systems at scale.
• Expertise in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, C++, Java) and strong fundamentals in systems architecture and infrastructure.
• Proven experience leading the design of large-scale services used by 1000s (or millions) of customers.
• Passion for mentoring and elevating those around you—technical leadership is about multiplying impact.

Compensation Range:

• $227,040 - $283,800