Digitalocean98
Senior Director of Engineering, Managed MySQL
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Senior Director of Engineering, Managed MySQL
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Job description
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.
DigitalOcean is building a next-generation cloud for AI-native developers and businesses. Managed MySQL is a foundational service in that ecosystem: it powers production applications, SaaS platforms, commerce systems, metadata stores, identity systems, application backends, and increasingly the transactional state layer for AI-native applications.
We are looking for a senior engineering leader to own DigitalOcean’s Managed MySQL service and engineering charter end-to-end. This leader will be responsible for the current Managed MySQL offering while raising the bar for reliability, performance, scale, durability, observability, security, and operational excellence.
This is also a strategic product and architecture role. MySQL remains one of the most widely adopted operational databases for developers and digital businesses. As AI-native applications emerge, MySQL will continue to serve as the system of record for user state, application state, billing data, customer metadata, product data, permissions, workflow state, and high-throughput transactional workloads. The right leader will shape the architecture and technology strategy required to evolve Managed MySQL from a reliable managed database into a differentiated, AI-ready operational database platform.
The ideal candidate will combine strong product judgment, deep technical expertise in distributed systems and databases, and the rigorous operational standards required for managing mission-critical data services. The mandate is simple: make DigitalOcean Managed MySQL trusted for mission-critical workloads today and essential for AI-native builders tomorrow.
What You’ll Do
- End-to-End Ownership: Lead the engineering organization (availability, scalability, performance, security, and long-term architecture) for both Standard and Advanced editions of Managed MySQL on DigitalOcean.
- Operational Excellence: Set the bar for a tier-0 cloud database service with clear SLIs/SLOs and robust incident response.
- Production-Grade Platform: Drive high-availability architecture, automated failover, connection routing, and seamless scaling.
- Serve Demanding Customers: Support large-scale, business-critical workloads through improved tooling, VPC-based deployment, and clear reference architectures.
- Define AI-Native Strategy: Create the roadmap for MySQL as an operational data substrate for AI (agentic systems, metadata, high-throughput ingestion).
- Strategic Architecture: Own long-term technical strategy, including replication, fleet automation, and multi-region resilience.
- Build High-Performing Teams: Recruit and lead strong engineering talent with a focus on ownership, accountability, and reliability.
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with Product, GTM, and SRE teams to align the engineering roadmap with market needs.
- Technical Rigor: Champion high standards, simplifying complexity and preventing reliability debt.
What Success Looks Like (12 Months)
- Tier-0 Reliability: Achieved clear SLOs and measurably improved incident response.
- Enhanced Scaling: Successful support for large, complex production workloads.
- Enterprise Support: Established migration paths and operational playbooks for large customers.
- AI-Ready Roadmap: Delivered a differentiated, AI-native database strategy.
- Organizational Maturity: Clear ownership boundaries and a scalable technical strategy.
- Competitive Positioning: DigitalOcean competes effectively on reliability and price-performance.
What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean
- Required Experience: 15+ years of engineering experience (cloud/data/distributed systems), 6+ years managing managers, and proven success operating high-availability, production-scale services. Deep expertise in distributed systems, consistency, and database management. Strong executive communication and customer judgment.
- Preferred Experience: Expertise in MySQL or similar ecosystems (RDS, Aurora, Vitess). Experience building HA architectures, scaling databases (sharding, read scaling), and familiarity with AI-native data patterns (agent state, event-driven architecture). Open-source credibility is a plus.
Key Metrics
- Reliability: Availability, RTO/RPO, backup/restore success, data durability.
- Operational Health: Incident rate, change failure rate, MTTD/MTTR.
- Performance: Query performance, replication lag, scaling workflow success.
- Business Impact: Adoption, revenue growth, retention, and onboarding success.
- Execution: Velocity, hiring, and retention.
Why This Role Matters
MySQL is critical for AI-native companies, serving as the system of record for state, metadata, and transactional context. DigitalOcean’s success hinges on rigorous standards—developers demand "boringly reliable" foundations for their mission-critical apps. This role is essential for transforming Managed MySQL into a reliable, AI-ready platform for the future.
*This job is located in Bengaluru, India
#LI-Hybrid
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.
- DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. 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.
Application Limit: 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.
