Sr. Director of Engineering, Managed PostgreSQL and AI-Native Database Platform

<div class="content-intro"><p>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. &nbsp;We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world.&nbsp;</p></div><p>We are seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead DigitalOcean’s Managed PostgreSQL organization. This leader will own the strategy, architecture, reliability, scalability and long-term evolution of our PostgreSQL offerings and the next generation capabilities that enable developers to build highly scalable, data-intensive, and AI-native applications.</p> <p>The ideal candidate will merge sophisticated product vision with technical expertise in distributed systems and the rigorous operational standards required for database management. Your mandate is simple: <strong>make DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL trusted for mission-critical workloads today, and essential for AI-native builders tomorrow.</strong></p> <h2><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></h2> <h3><strong>Own Managed PostgreSQL end-to-end</strong></h3> <p>Lead the organization responsible for all PostgreSQL editions, overseeing availability, scalability, security, and long-term architecture.</p> <h3><strong>Build hyperscaler-grade reliability and operational excellence</strong></h3> <p>Establish tier-0 reliability standards. Execute against SLIs/SLOs for failover, backups, and query performance to ensure a high bar for operational excellence.</p> <h3><strong>Scale Advanced Edition into a production-grade platform</strong></h3> <p>Evolve the Advanced Edition into a differentiated offering featuring HA architecture, consensus-based failover, and fast restore capabilities.</p> <h3><strong>Serve large and demanding database customers</strong></h3> <p>Support large-scale workloads (up to 64 TB) with storage scaling, read-only nodes, and query insights to meet demanding customer needs.</p> <h3><strong>Define the AI-native PostgreSQL strategy</strong></h3> <p>Integrate PostgreSQL with AI workflows via pgvector, metadata stores, and agent memory, positioning it as the core substrate for AI builders.</p> <h3><strong>Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization</strong></h3> <p>Build a high-performing global organization with strong accountability and technical review mechanisms.</p> <h3><strong>Partner deeply across Product, GTM, Support, SRE, Infrastructure, and AI/Data teams</strong></h3> <p>Translate customer needs, competitive gaps, and market shifts into a coherent engineering roadmap. Work closely with Product and GTM to define packaging, migration motions, enterprise readiness, roadmap sequencing, launch quality, and customer adoption.</p> <h3><strong>Raise the technical bar</strong></h3> <p>Be credible in architecture discussions with principal engineers and senior database experts. The role requires enough depth to challenge designs, evaluate tradeoffs, simplify complexity, and prevent the organization from accumulating reliability debt under the cover of roadmap velocity.</p> <h2><strong>What Success Looks Like</strong></h2> <p>Key outcomes within one year:</p> <ul> <li>PostgreSQL operates as a tier-0 service with measurable reliability gains and improved incident response.</li> <li>Advanced Edition has a credible path from preview/early adoption to production-grade readiness for demanding workloads.</li> <li>Large customer workloads have clear reference architectures, migration paths, operational playbooks, and escalation mechanisms.</li> <li>PostgreSQL has a differentiated AI-native roadmap, in addition to pgvector.</li> <li>Advanced Edition is production-ready and the technical strategy scales to 64 TB.</li> <li>DigitalOcean competes effectively against hyperscalers on price, reliability, and developer experience.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What You’ll Bring</strong></h2> <h3><strong>Required Experience</strong></h3> <ul> <li>15+ years of engineering experience, including significant leadership of cloud infrastructure, database, storage, distributed systems, or data platform organizations.</li> <li>6+ years managing managers and leading multi-team engineering organizations.</li> <li>Proven experience operating customer-facing, high-availability production services with strict reliability, durability, and incident-management expectations.</li> <li>Strong distributed systems foundation: replication, consensus, failure detection, failover, consistency, partitioning, control planes, fleet automation, and multi-tenant operations.</li> <li>Experience with database systems, managed database services, storage engines, query performance, backup/restore, high availability, or large-scale stateful infrastructure.</li> <li>Demonstrated ability to define multi-quarter technical strategy and convert it into shipped customer value.</li> <li>Strong customer judgment: ability to understand enterprise-grade workload requirements and separate real customer needs from noisy feature requests.</li> <li>Executive communication skills; able to represent the business and technical strategy to senior leadership, customers, partners, and GTM teams.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Preferred Experience</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Deep PostgreSQL experience, especially operating PostgreSQL at scale&nbsp;</li> <li>Experience with RDS/Aurora, AlloyDB, Cloud SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Neon, Crunchy, EDB, Yugabyte, Citus, Timescale, Supabase, or similar PostgreSQL ecosystems.</li> <li>Experience building or operating HA architectures using proxies, connection poolers, consensus systems, automated primary election, online upgrades, and backup/restore pipelines.</li> <li>Familiarity with pgvector, pgvectorscale, hybrid search, RAG architectures, AI application data patterns, and agent memory/state systems.</li> <li>Experience scaling databases beyond single-node limits through read scaling, sharding, distributed SQL, storage/compute separation, or workload-aware architecture.</li> <li>Experience partnering with product and GTM teams to turn platform capabilities into compelling commercial offerings.</li> <li>Open-source credibility or strong familiarity with the PostgreSQL ecosystem.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Key Metrics</strong></h2> <p>This leader will be accountable for metrics such as:</p> <ul> <li>Availability, failover success rate, RTO/RPO, backup success rate, restore time, and data durability.</li> <li>Fleet health, incident rate, change failure rate, mean time to detect, and mean time to recover.</li> <li>Query performance, replication lag, connection stability, noisy-neighbor isolation, and scaling workflow success.</li> <li>Advanced Edition adoption, migration success, revenue growth, attach rate, and retention.</li> <li>Large customer onboarding success and reduction in high-severity escalations.</li> <li>Engineering execution velocity, hiring quality, retention, and succession depth.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Why This Role Matters</strong></h2> <p>PostgreSQL is no longer just the default relational database for web applications. For AI-native companies, it is becoming the operational system of record, the metadata layer, the agent state store, the retrieval companion, and often the first place developers want to add vector and AI-aware capabilities.</p> <p>DigitalOcean has a right to win here only if it is honest about the bar. Developers will forgive missing features before they forgive data loss, unreliable failover, poor observability, or painful scaling. This leader’s job is to make Managed PostgreSQL boringly reliable at the core and strategically ambitious at the edge.</p> <h2><strong>Compensation Range:&nbsp;</strong></h2> <ul> <li>$261,600.00 - $327,000.00</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">*This is a hybrid role</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">JR: 2026-7844</span></p> <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">#LI-Hybrid</span></em></span></p><div class="content-conclusion"><h2 class="p-rich_text_section"><strong data-stringify-type="bold">Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean</strong></h2> <ul class="p-rich_text_list p-rich_text_list__bullet p-rich_text_list--nested" data-stringify-type="unordered-list" data-list-tree="true" data-indent="0" data-border="0"> <li data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><strong data-stringify-type="bold">We innovate with purpose. </strong>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.</li> <li data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><strong data-stringify-type="bold">We prioritize career development.</strong> 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.</li> <li data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><strong data-stringify-type="bold">We care about your well-being.&nbsp;</strong>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.</li> <li data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><strong data-stringify-type="bold">We reward our employees. </strong>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.</li> <li data-stringify-indent="0" data-stringify-border="0"><strong data-stringify-type="bold">DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. </strong>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.</li> </ul> <p><strong data-stringify-type="bold">Application Limit:</strong>&nbsp;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.</p></div>