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 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.
Primary Focuses:
Reduce incident durations: By taking an active role in incident management, trimming down bloated processes, and leading cross-team efforts, the Availability Team decreases downtime and improves reliability. Enhance Customer Satisfaction: By communicating effectively during incidents, and writing clear, concise post-mortems, the Availability Team will improve customer trust and retention.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 VictoriaMetrics, 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 6 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 processes You will tweak, rewrite, and introduce 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 Embedding directly with service teams You’ll have to dive into unknown codebases written in languages 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 do not enforce top-down mandates, we collaborate with teams with an aim to assist. 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. 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: Experience using or administering Linux systems At DigitalOcean, we live & breathe Linux - our systems primarily run Ubuntu. Experience writing documents in english - especially technical documentation, post-mortems, and blogs Our team is sometimes responsible for writing public, customer-facing content If you have a blog, mention it in your application! Experience reading, writing, and debugging code (any language is fine) We primarily work with Python, Rust, and Golang, but adaptability is more important than any single language Familiarity with incident management Our team is deeply involved with incidents - any prior experience at a NOC, doing triage, etc would be very valuable. Familiarity with shell & git Familiarity with continuous integration systems and concepts Familiarity with Github Actions or Concourse is a plus Experience leveraging monitoring systems (e.g. Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, Looker, Elasticsearch) for data-driven outcomes Comfortable executing in an asynchronous remote environment The Availability team is spread across North America and Europe!