Staff Engineer (Availability)

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 Availability Team, And Act As a Contributor To The Team’s Mission

Mission: Improve customer happiness and retention by driving availability and process improvements across the company.

Focuses

• Reduce incident durations: By taking an active role in incident management, trimming down bloated processes, and embedding within teams, the Availability Team decreases downtime and improves reliability.
• Enhance Customer Satisfaction: communicating effectively during incidents, and writing clear, concise post-mortems will increase customer trust and retention.
• Promote Standardization: Identify and escalate inconsistencies in tools and platforms to promote uniformity and reduce toil & errors.
• Mitigate Platform Risk: By embedding with other teams, you’ll be capable of identifying areas of need and assisting teams that are underwater, resulting in a more resilient system.

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

DigitalOcean’s Internal Culture and Tooling

DigitalOcean teams communicate primarily via Slack. The Availability team makes 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, potentially managing very high-priority incidents.

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 Availability team exists within the Resiliency division, an arm of the Infrastructure department. We are aimed at driving fast recovery 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, and Europe.

The Availability team is a new mission within DO and will be made up of roughly 8 engineers with various skill sets and backgrounds. There are growth opportunities along several tracks (i.e. Tech Lead, Staff Engineer, Project Manager, Engineering Manager, etc).

What You’ll Be Doing

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

• Improving toilsome availability-related policies & processes

• You will tweak, rewrite, and introduce policies and processes that have company-wide impact. You will need to be organized, patient, flexible, and empathetic.

• Communicating incident status clearly to customers

• You will need to be capable of understanding complex, ongoing technical issues and writing clear, accurate reports intended for public consumption

• Working with service teams to drive availability improvements

• You’ll have to dive into tech stacks you’re not familiar with - the ability to learn quickly and pick things up on the fly will be key.

• You will need to be comfortable meeting folks where they’re at. We collaborate with teams with an aim to assist. Mentoring engineers on SRE best practices and driving rapid, incremental improvement that will have the largest impact in a given space are key to succeeding in this role.

• Communicating internally with tons of lovely engineers

• This role is quite public - you will need to be comfortable speaking with a diverse set of engineers located around the globe.

• Working collaboratively in a changing environment

• You will work cross-functionally to drive rapid, iterative improvements to our operational posture.

• You will collaborate with architects, managers, and other business leaders of all types to drive improvements.

• Driving data-informed decision making

• The Availability team leverages operational data to drive the right outcomes.

• You will develop custom reporting leveraging Python, Plotly, Grafana, and MySQL, among other tools and various data sources.

• You should be outcome-oriented - instead of being attached to particular tools or processes, you should seek to drive improvements via concrete outcomes.

• Responding to Slack messages & keeping up with various streams of conversation

• Our work can require a lot of context switching - you’ll need to be comfortable hopping from one Slack conversation to another, many times per day.

• Spending time on hackathons, education, employee groups, and open source projects

• You may spend roughly 5-20% of your time on things unrelated to your primary responsibilities. Hackathons, upstream open source work, employee resource groups - you name it!

What We’ll Expect From You

• Significant experience using or administering Linux systems

• At DigitalOcean, we live & breathe Linux - our systems primarily run Ubuntu!

• Significant experience writing documents in English - especially technical documentation, post-mortems, and/or blogging

• If you have a blog, mention it in your application!

• Significant experience reading, writing, and debugging code

• We primarily work with Python and Golang, but adaptability is more important than any single language

• Experience with incident management and incident response

• Our team is deeply involved with incidents - any prior experience at a NOC, doing triage, etc will be very valuable.

• A strong SRE background

• You’ve read the SRE book, worked in one or more SRE roles, and you understand how to apply these learnings to drive positive outcomes in an organization that does not strictly adhere to SRE

• Proficiency with shell & git

• Proficiency with continuous integration systems and concepts

• Familiarity with Github Actions is a plus

• Experience leveraging monitoring systems (e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, Looker, Elasticsearch) for data-driven outcomes

• Comfortable executing in an asynchronous remote environment

• The Availability team is spread across North America and Europe! 🌎 🌍

• Transparency, honesty, and openness to constructive feedback

• A desire to work with a respectful and inclusive team

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

_Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

• We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful sense of responsibility for customers, products, employees, and decisions.
• We prioritize career development. At DO, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education. All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
• We care about your well-being. Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
• We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is $161,300 - $201,000 based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• We value diversity and inclusion. We are an equal-opportunity employer, and recognize that diversity of thought and background builds stronger teams and products to serve our customers. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We 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.
• This is a remote role