Engineer II

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 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 and has SRE skills. 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 duration and frequency: 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.
• Create Meaningful Metrics and Dashboards: Defining and refining relevant metrics, building informative dashboards, and establishing effective alerting thresholds.
• Automate Repetitive Tasks: Manual processes related to monitoring, reporting, and other tasks the Availability team handles.

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 over 40 engineers located across the US, Canada, and Europe.

What You’ll Be Doing:

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

• Spending a 1-2 days a week on-call including shift work during set hours on those days
  • Tue - Thu: Flexible hours doing availability work
  • Fri - Sat: Set hours doing operations / incident response
  • Sun - Mon: Off
• Driving the mitigation and resolution of incidents, as well as handling incident reviews/postmortems
• Example Schedule:
• 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.
• Identifying opportunities for improvement
• You will have a platform to suggest and drive improvements when it comes to monitoring, alerting, incident resolution, and other processes around the organization
• You should be comfortable providing feedback early and often
• 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 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.

What You'll Add to DigitalOcean:

• On-Call Responsibility:
• You will participate in an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents and ensure the continuous availability of our services.
• Champion Reliability and Availability
• You'll be deeply invested in maintaining and improving the uptime and overall health of our cloud infrastructure and applications, helping to instrument, strive for, and exceed our service level objectives (SLOs).
• Automation First Mindset
• You'll identify and automate repetitive tasks, infrastructure provisioning, deployments, and monitoring processes to improve efficiency, reduce toil, and minimize human error.
• Scalability Design and Implementation
• You'll contribute to the design and implementation of scalable and resilient systems that can handle rapid growth and fluctuating demand.
• Experience using or administering Linux systems
• At DigitalOcean, we live & breathe Linux - our systems primarily run Ubuntu.
• 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! 🌎 🌍
• 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 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

#LI-Remote