Staff Software Engineer

DigitalOcean; Remote; GBP 122,000 - 153,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading cloud infrastructure company is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Customer Observability team. The role involves architecting, building, and maintaining large-scale distributed systems for the company's observability ecosystem. The ideal candidate will have 15+ years of experience in cloud services, strong programming skills in Go (Golang), and a deep understanding of observability tools and technologies. As this is a remote position, teamwork and collaboration across distributed teams are essential.

Benefits

Flexible time off policy

Reimbursement for conferences and training

Competitive array of benefits

Equity compensation available

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience building large-scale cloud services.
• Strong programming skills in Go (Golang).
• Demonstrated ability to drive operational excellence.

Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain scalable backend services.
• Drive cross-team projects from concept to production.
• Provide technical guidance to other engineers.

Skills

Distributed systems fundamentals

Programming in Go (Golang)

Observability and monitoring

Collaboration skills

Database knowledge (SQL, NoSQL)

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Kafka

Terraform

Ansible

gRPC

Job description

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 looking for a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to join our Customer Observability/ Insights team. In this role, you’ll architect, build, and maintain large-scale distributed systems that power DigitalOcean’s Customer facing Observability ecosystem. You’ll collaborate across engineering, product, and design teams to deliver reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly solutions that help our teams monitor, measure, and optimize cloud infrastructure at scale.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Architect, design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and systems.
• Drive technical initiatives and large cross-team projects from concept to production.
• Collaborate with product managers, UX designers, and engineers across distributed teams to deliver end-to-end solutions.
• Develop deep expertise in observability tools and technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, time-series databases, and distributed tracing.
• Build and maintain high-performance APIs and microservices using Go (Golang) and gRPC, integrating with systems like Kafka, Redis, and NoSQL databases.
• Work with Terraform and Ansible to automate infrastructure deployment and configuration management.
• Utilize knowledge of SQL for data analysis, service integration, and operational insights.
• Lead efforts in debugging, troubleshooting, and performance tuning of complex distributed systems.
• Champion operational excellence by improving reliability, monitoring, and alerting practices.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to other engineers.

What You’ll Bring to DigitalOcean

• 15+ years of relevant industry experience building and operating large-scale cloud services or distributed systems in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
• Strong programming experience in Go (Golang) and deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals.
• Solid understanding of observability, monitoring, and alerting systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).
• Experience working with OTEL (OpenTelemetry) Collector, including instrumentation, data pipelines, and telemetry ingestion for metrics, logs, and traces.
• Proven experience designing and implementing scalable event-driven architectures using Kafka or similar technologies.
• Experience with gRPC, Terraform, and Ansible for service communication and infrastructure automation.
• Working knowledge of SQL, Redis, and NoSQL databases.
• Demonstrated ability to drive operational excellence and improve system reliability.
• Experience making pragmatic technical trade-offs while balancing short-term needs and long-term goals.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, especially with geographically distributed teams.
• Strong ownership mindset and the ability to independently deliver high-impact projects.

Nice to Have

• Experience with cloud-native environments (Kubernetes, Docker, microservices).
• Familiarity with time-series databases and distributed tracing frameworks.
• Prior experience building or maintaining observability platforms.

Compensation Range

• $163,456 - $204,320

*This is a remote role

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 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.
• DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. 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.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.