Staff Engineer - Network Infrastructure

About the Role

DigitalOcean is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help design and build the next generation of software powering our global network infrastructure.

This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, networking, distributed systems, and hardware acceleration. You will build the automation, orchestration, and infrastructure software that enables DigitalOcean to scale its network reliably while exploring new architectures using Data Processing Units (DPUs), SmartNICs, and programmable network infrastructure.

You will work closely with network, infrastructure, and hardware engineering teams to turn complex networking and infrastructure requirements into scalable software. This includes everything from network provisioning and device lifecycle management to telemetry, automated remediation, and software-driven network and DPU orchestration.

As a Staff Engineer, you will have impact beyond your own code. You will establish technical direction, drive architectural decisions, identify opportunities to move functionality into software and hardware accelerators, and help define how DigitalOcean's infrastructure evolves over the coming years.

A key part of the role is the ability to turn ambiguous technical problems into clear proposals and executable plans. You will be expected to author RFCs, architecture and design documents, technical proposals, and other project documentation needed to establish alignment and drive complex initiatives from concept through implementation.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design and build network automation and orchestration systems that enable reliable deployment and operation of DigitalOcean's global network infrastructure.
• Develop software for network provisioning, configuration management, device lifecycle management, validation, monitoring, and automated remediation.
• Design and build software systems that integrate with DPUs, SmartNICs, and programmable network infrastructure.
• Develop automation supporting large-scale datacenter and Point of Presence deployments, including new hardware, network fabrics, routing infrastructure, and vendor integrations.
• Build systems that abstract differences across network vendors, and hardware implementations while maintaining strong operational safety and reliability.
• Build tools that help engineers diagnose network and infrastructure issues and automate common operational workflows.
• Identify manual, repetitive, or error-prone infrastructure operations and turn them into scalable software solutions.
• Partner closely with network engineers and infrastructure architects to translate complex networking and hardware requirements into maintainable software architectures.
• Establish engineering standards and best practices for infrastructure software development, testing, observability, and operational readiness.
• Lead projects from early technical design through implementation, deployment, and long-term operation.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership across the broader engineering organization.

What We're Looking For

• Significant experience designing and building production software systems at scale.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including distributed systems, API design, concurrency, testing, observability, and system reliability.
• Strong programming experience in one or more languages such as Go, Python, or C++
• Experience building automation, orchestration, or infrastructure platforms.
• Strong understanding of networking, including TCP/IP, BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, VLANs, routing, switching, and network telemetry.
• Experience working with network devices, network automation frameworks, APIs, or vendor SDKs.
• Experience designing systems that operate safely in highly available, production environments.
• Ability to understand complex infrastructure problems and simplify them into scalable software architectures.
• Strong technical writing skills, with demonstrated ability to produce RFCs, architecture/design documents, technical proposals, project plans, and other documentation required to drive complex engineering projects.
• Ability to take ambiguous problems and turn them into clear technical proposals, documented requirements, architectural decisions, and actionable implementation plans.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical decisions across engineering teams.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a technical leader without relying on organizational authority.

Experience in one or more of the following is particularly valuable:

• Building software that uses DPUs for networking, security, storage, virtualization, or infrastructure offload.
• Designing DPU orchestration, provisioning, lifecycle management, or configuration systems.
• Experience with programmable data planes, eBPF, P4, or other technologies used to implement network functionality in hardware or accelerated environments.
• Experience integrating DPUs or SmartNICs into cloud, datacenter, or virtualization infrastructure.

At the Staff level, you will be expected to:

• Own technical direction for significant areas of network and infrastructure software.
• Define the software architecture required to integrate emerging technologies such as DPUs and programmable infrastructure into DigitalOcean's production environment.
• Identify systemic infrastructure problems and define solutions that span multiple teams and infrastructure layers.
• Make architectural decisions that balance scalability, reliability, performance, hardware capabilities, operational complexity, and engineering velocity.
• Lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives from problem definition through design, implementation, deployment, and operation.
• Own the technical documentation and RFC process for major initiatives, ensuring that architecture, requirements, alternatives, tradeoffs, dependencies, risks, and decisions are clearly documented.
• Actively leverage AI tooling to amplify engineering impact and delivery speed, using AI to accelerate development, debugging, testing, documentation, and exploration of technical solutions while applying strong engineering judgment and maintaining production-quality standards. 
• Create leverage by developing platforms, abstractions, and automation that enable other engineers to move faster.
• Anticipate operational and scalability challenges before they become production problems.
• Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies and determine where they can provide meaningful advantages to DigitalOcean's infrastructure.
• Raise the technical capabilities of the broader engineering organization through mentoring, design reviews, technical documentation, and technical leadership.
• Build strong partnerships across Network Infrastructure, Compute, Storage, Availability, Security, and Hardware/Platform Engineering.

Nice to have:

• Experience building software for hyperscale or cloud infrastructure.
• Production experience with DPUs, SmartNICs, or IPUs.
• Experience with DPU-based network, storage, security, or virtualization offload.
• Experience with SONiC or other disaggregated networking platforms.
• Experience working with white-box networking and multiple network vendors.
• Experience building or operating 400G+ datacenter networks.
• Experience with OpenConfig, gNMI, NETCONF, YANG, or similar network management technologies.
• Experience with streaming telemetry and large-scale network observability.
• Experience building automated network validation, testing, or remediation systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Experience with eBPF, P4, programmable data planes, or hardware-accelerated networking.
• Experience contributing to or leading open-source infrastructure projects.

Why DigitalOcean

At DigitalOcean, you'll have the opportunity to solve challenging infrastructure problems at significant scale while helping build technology that makes cloud infrastructure simpler and more accessible.

The Network Infrastructure Engineering organization plays a foundational role in DigitalOcean's ability to expand its datacenter footprint, increase network capacity, improve reliability, introduce new network technologies, and deliver a consistent experience to customers around the world.

This role provides an opportunity to shape how networking and infrastructure software interacts with the underlying hardware. The ideal candidate will help DigitalOcean move beyond traditional host-based networking toward a more programmable and hardware-accelerated infrastructure architecture, while maintaining the simplicity, reliability, and operational excellence expected from a cloud platform.

The Staff Engineer will have the opportunity to influence this evolution from architecture through implementation—identifying opportunities, evaluating technologies, writing RFCs and technical proposals, aligning engineering teams, and ultimately delivering production systems that operate at DigitalOcean scale.

Compensation Range: 

• $191,200 - $239,000

*This is a hybrid role

JR: 2026-8150

#LI-Hybrid