Software Engineer II - Managed Kubernetes products

We are seeking a Software Engineer II to join our App Platform and Functions engineering team. App Platform is DigitalOcean’s managed PaaS: customers ship apps from source to production on Kubernetes-backed infrastructure without managing clusters themselves. Functions is our serverless compute product, running event-driven workloads on a secure, multi-tenant runtime. Together these products sit on the critical path for developers deploying and scaling modern applications—and increasingly AI and agent workloads—on DigitalOcean.

In this role, you will contribute meaningfully to building and operating the control plane and runtime systems that power App Platform and Functions. You will work within established technical frameworks, implement features against well-scoped designs, and grow your expertise in distributed systems, Kubernetes, and cloud-native platforms. If you are passionate about writing clean, reliable code and want to deepen your ownership of production PaaS and serverless systems, this is the team for you.

What You’ll Do

• Build & Extend: Implement features and bug fixes across App Platform and Functions services in Go, working within established architectural patterns and contributing to a high-reliability, multi-tenant platform.
• Control Plane & APIs: Contribute to gRPC and HTTP APIs, reconciliation loops, and lifecycle workflows that create, update, deploy, and operate customer apps and functions at scale.
• Kubernetes Runtime: Work with Kubernetes-backed infrastructure—deployments, networking, autoscaling, and cluster-facing controllers—to improve how workloads are scheduled, isolated, observed, and healed.
• Serverless & Scale: Help improve Functions runtime behavior, including cold-start/warm-path performance, isolation, reliability, and operational tooling for event-driven workloads.
• Operate What You Build: Participate in on-call rotations, investigate production issues, write runbooks, and develop ownership of the services you contribute to.
• Learn & Grow: Partner with senior engineers to deepen your understanding of distributed systems, Kubernetes internals, and PaaS/serverless architecture—building the skills to take on increasing ownership over time.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work with teammates across App Platform, Functions, Edge, Networking, and adjacent product teams to understand how your work fits into the broader cloud platform.
• Engineering Excellence: Write unit and integration tests, participate in code reviews, leave code cleaner than you found it, and help raise the bar on reliability and operability.

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean

• Experience: 2–4 years of software engineering experience, with a strong foundation in building and shipping production services.
• Language Proficiency: Proficiency in Go, or a strong background in another typed systems language with demonstrated ability to ramp quickly.
• Kubernetes Familiarity: Working knowledge of Kubernetes concepts (Deployments, Services, Controllers/Operators, resource limits, networking basics); hands-on experience deploying or operating workloads on Kubernetes is a plus.
• Systems Thinking: Understanding of how distributed systems work—replication, latency trade-offs, failure modes, reconciliation—and curiosity to go dee