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

Digitalocean98

Seattle, US$262k – $327konsite

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About this role

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 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.

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: make DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL trusted for mission-critical workloads today, and essential for AI-native builders tomorrow.

What You’ll Do

Own Managed PostgreSQL end-to-end

Lead the organization responsible for all PostgreSQL editions, overseeing availability, scalability, security, and long-term architecture.

Build hyperscaler-grade reliability and operational excellence

Establish tier-0 reliability standards. Execute against SLIs/SLOs for failover, backups, and query performance to ensure a high bar for operational excellence.

Scale Advanced Edition into a production-grade platform

Evolve the Advanced Edition into a differentiated offering featuring HA architecture, consensus-based failover, and fast restore capabilities.

Serve large and demanding database customers

Support large-scale workloads (up to 64 TB) with storage scaling, read-only nodes, and query insights to meet demanding customer needs.

Define the AI-native PostgreSQL strategy

Integrate PostgreSQL with AI workflows via pgvector, metadata stores, and agent memory, positioning it as the core substrate for AI builders.

Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization

Build a high-performing global organization with strong accountability and technical review mechanisms.

Partner deeply across Product, GTM, Support, SRE, Infrastructure, and AI/Data teams

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.

Raise the technical bar

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.

What Success Looks Like

Key outcomes within one year:

• PostgreSQL operates as a tier-0 service with measurable reliability gains and improved incident response.

• Advanced Edition has a credible path from preview/early adoption to production-grade readiness for demanding workloads.

• Large customer workloads have clear reference architectures, migration paths, operational playbooks, and escalation mechanisms.

• PostgreSQL has a differentiated AI-native roadmap, in addition to pgvector.

• Advanced Edition is production-ready and the technical strategy scales to 64 TB.

• DigitalOcean competes effectively against hyperscalers on price, reliability, and developer experience.

What You’ll Bring

Required Experience

• 15+ years of engineering experience, including significant leadership of cloud infrastructure, database, storage, distributed systems, or data platform organizations.

• 6+ years managing managers and leading multi-team engineering organizations.

• Proven experience operating customer-facing, high-availability production services with strict reliability, durability, and incident-management expectations.

• Strong distributed systems foundation: replication, consensus, failure detection, failover, consistency, partitioning, control planes, fleet automation, and multi-tenant operations.

• Experience with database systems, managed database services, storage engines, query performance, backup/restore, high availability, or large-scale stateful infrastructure.

• Demonstrated ability to define multi-quarter technical strategy and convert it into shipped customer value.

• Strong customer judgment: ability to understand enterprise-grade workload requirements and separate real customer needs from noisy feature requests.

• Executive communication skills; able to represent the business and technical strategy to senior leadership, customers, partners, and GTM teams.

Preferred Experience

• Deep PostgreSQL experience, especially operating PostgreSQL at scale

• Experience with RDS/Aurora, AlloyDB, Cloud SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Neon, Crunchy, EDB, Yugabyte, Citus, Timescale, Supabase, or similar PostgreSQL ecosystems.

• Experience building or operating HA architectures using proxies, connection poolers, consensus systems, automated primary election, online upgrades, and backup/restore pipelines.

• Familiarity with pgvector, pgvectorscale, hybrid search, RAG architectures, AI application data patterns, and agent memory/state systems.

• Experience scaling databases beyond single-node limits through read scaling, sharding, distributed SQL, storage/compute separation, or workload-aware architecture.

• Experience partnering with product and GTM teams to turn platform capabilities into compelling commercial offerings.

• Open-source credibility or strong familiarity with the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Key Metrics

This leader will be accountable for metrics such as:

• Availability, failover success rate, RTO/RPO, backup success rate, res

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