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!