API Engineer (Platform Engineering)

We want people who are passionate about building APIs our community of developers love.

Our community loves us for our powerful, easy to use tools and interfaces. We help them scale their business to the next level. We are looking for engineers to join our API Engineering team. 

API Engineering works closely with our community and our internal teams; this role is an excellent fit for someone who is highly collaborative. We are involved in all aspects of API strategy and development: collaborating with product strategy and UX; partnering with internal dev teams on design and architecture of endpoints; strategizing with SRE and security; and working with developer relations and customer support to provide our developer community with tools they love. API Engineering owns the API infrastructure: our gateways and middleware, the clients and CLIs, as well as a growing suite of tools to build, maintain and monitor endpoints. Much of our code is open source.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Collaborating with engineers, UX, product, support, data science and more to provide a consistent, coherent public API.
• Providing expertise on the public API, API Gateway, API Tokens, doctl CLI and API client tools to support the larger engineering community at DigitalOcean in delivering products and features.
• Partnering with our infrastructure teams for shared infrastructure needs (Auth, Deployment, Observability).
• Build features and fix bugs on full stack production applications built with React front ends, Go based back end services and MySQL databases
• Monitoring our production services and responding to incidents. This includes troubleshooting complex distributed systems.
• Interacting directly with the developer community via Github PRs, etc.
• Engaging with the larger engineering community at DigitalOcean to identify gaps and craft impactful improvements that meet the needs of the business.
• Participate in a culture of writing: 1-Pagers, ADRs, and RFCs that drive awareness and incorporate the voice of our internal and external customers in our roadmaps and proposals.
• Participating in large multi-quarter projects and efforts.
• Responding to Slack messages and keeping up with various streams of conversation, including triaging user support requests.
• You will be on call at times, and expected to handle unexpected incidents.

What We Expect From You:

API Engineering owns a broad portfolio and our day to day tasks have a lot of variety. In order to be successful we require the following skills and experience:

• Passion for delivering simple and elegant solutions that developers will love.
• Empathy for our developer users and the customers/stakeholders you support.
• Proficiency with the Go programming language. Proficiency in additional languages is a plus (Java, C#, Python, TypeScript etc.)
• Experience with distributed systems: building, operating, maintaining and troubleshooting.
• Experience with CI/CD, GitHub Actions, synthetic and smoke testing, and alerting.
• Expertise working cross-functionally with distributed teams.
• Clear communication through effective and crisp documentation, presentations, and asynchronous channels in a remote environment.
• A natural curiosity in what lies beyond the existing status quo to improve how we operate and deliver for our internal and external customers, and the products we build to empower their success.
• Familiarity with docker, kubernetes and linux based operating systems.
• Experience interacting with customers directly through various channels.

Additional strengths we’re looking for. If you have experience with any of the following we’d like to learn more about it:

• Opinions about API, client and CLI design: Who are the inspirational/aspirational companies doing it well or not so well in your estimation?
• Some familiarity/experience with at least two of REST, GraphQL, and gRPC, extensive knowledge of at least one.
• Understanding of API versioning strategies, access control, and other best practices.
• Familiarity with Terraform is a plus.
• Familiarity with OpenAPI v3 and/or API contract testing a plus.
• Experience with implementation and maintenance of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Experience building and maintaining CLI-based tooling for engineers.
• Experience with API Gateways, HAProxy load balancers or Consul.
• React/TypeScript experience.

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean:

• We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is between $110,000.00 - $130,000.00 based on relevant years of experience and skills. Employees 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 grants of equity upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• We value development. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that is always challenging our teams and employees to continuously grow. We maintain a growth mindset in everything we do and invest deeply in employee development through formalized mentorship and other internal programs. We provide all employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
• We care about your well-being. In addition to cash and equity compensation, we also offer employees a competitive array of benefits. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary in other countries due to local regulations and preferences.
• We value diversity and inclusivity. We are an equal-opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

*This is a remote role

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