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We are looking for a visionary Senior Director of Engineering to lead and scale our Storage Products engineering organization in India. In this role, you will own the end-to-end engineering strategy and execution for DigitalOcean's storage portfolio, including Object Storage, Block Storage, File Storage, Backups, and Snapshots. You will build and lead multiple high-performing teams, shape the technical direction of our storage platform, and partner closely with senior product, design, and business leadership to deliver scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient storage services for customers around the world.
What You'll Do
- Define and own the multi-year engineering strategy and roadmap for Storage Products in India, aligning closely with global product and infrastructure leadership.
- Lead, grow, and inspire a multi-team engineering organization spanning Object Storage, Block Storage, File Storage, Backup and Snapshot services, storage infrastructure, and platform engineering.
- Partner with VP-level and C-suite stakeholders across Product, Infrastructure, Finance, and GTM teams to translate business priorities into executable technical plans.
- Drive organizational design, headcount planning, and talent strategy to scale the India engineering function in support of DigitalOcean's storage growth objectives.
- Establish engineering excellence across teams, including coding standards, architectural reviews, incident management, operational readiness, reliability engineering, and service health benchmarks.
- Champion a culture of customer obsession, operational excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement across the full software development lifecycle.
- Lead sustaining engineering strategy, including technical debt reduction, platform modernization, operational efficiency improvements, and long-term storage platform health.
- Manage delivery accountability across multiple concurrent programs, ensuring successful preview and GA launches while proactively mitigating dependencies and execution risks.
- Drive platform scalability, durability, availability, and performance improvements across DigitalOcean's storage offerings.
- Partner closely with infrastructure teams to optimize storage economics, hardware utilization, capacity planning, and datacenter expansion strategies.
- Recruit, retain, and develop senior engineering talent; drive performance management, career development frameworks, and succession planning across the India organization.
- Represent the India engineering organization in global leadership forums and serve as the primary escalation point for storage product engineering decisions.
What You'll Add to DigitalOcean
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 6+ years in senior engineering leadership or management roles, including managing managers.
- Demonstrated track record of building and scaling engineering organizations (50+ engineers) delivering cloud-scale storage platforms, distributed systems, or infrastructure products.
- Deep expertise in distributed storage systems, including object storage, block storage, file systems, data durability, replication, consistency models, and disaster recovery architectures.
- Proven ability to influence and align senior cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Infrastructure, Finance, and Operations in a global organizational structure.
- 8+ years of experience building storage, infrastructure, cloud platform, or data management products.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems at scale, including consensus protocols, replication, partitioning, fault tolerance, durability, and consistency tradeoffs.
- Experience operating large-scale storage platforms supporting multi-petabyte environments and billions of customer transactions.
- Deep Kubernetes expertise running stateful workloads and cloud-native storage services at scale.
- Experience building and operating highly available services with stringent durability, recovery point objective (RPO), and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements.
- Strong understanding of storage performance optimization, capacity management, observability, and operational excellence.
- Exceptional communication skills, executive presence, and the ability to operate effectively across time zones in a globally distributed company.
- Track record of operating with high ownership and bias for action in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
Nice to Have
- Experience architecting and operating large-scale distributed storage systems such as Ceph, MinIO, OpenZFS, Lustre, GlusterFS, or similar technologies.
- Experience with object storage systems compatible with Amazon S3 APIs.
- Experience building backup, snapshot, disaster recovery, archival, or data protection solutions.
- Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure workloads and storage requirements, including high-throughput file systems, data lakes, and GPU-accelerated environments.
- Contributions to open-source storage, infrastructure, or cloud-native projects.
- Experience leading engineering organizations through hypergrowth or significant organizational transformation.
