Job Description
Senior Product Security Engineer Secure Design (Kernel and Virtualization)
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.
You'll own the security risk posture for our virtualization stack. You'll get there by building the frameworks the org uses to reason about hypervisor risk — systematic threat models that surface risks shared rubrics for assessing their impact and likelihood and clear ways of communicating them to security kernel virtualization and provisioning teams. From there you'll own the response: designing and proposing defense-in-depth mitigations and driving their implementation.
As a member of the Product Security team you will report to the Manager of Secure Design. Our Secure Design team enables DigitalOcean to build secure-by-design products. We leverage strong relationships with both product teams and the rest of security engineering to be successful. The team’s scope is primarily focused on reviewing early-stage decisions developing threat models scaling impact via automation curating security patterns authoring security guidance training and championing security initiatives.
What you’ll do:Propose and implement mitigations and defense-in-depth to threats discovered through threat modeling the virtualization stack (90%)
- Provide deep technical expertise in systems architecture kernel security features and network architecture to build out a threat model for our virtualization stack
- Identify the trade-offs of different solutions and recommend the efficient design to achieve both functional goals and security requirements. We do not deliver mandates; we work alongside cross-functional partners to find mutually beneficial solutions.
- Collaborate with development teams to implement remediations and defense in depth to protect DigitalOcean’s customers’ workloads.
Cultivate and promote a security culture (10%)
- Mentor software engineering teams in security best practices.
- Help oversee our vulnerability management program (we call it security debt).
- Help DigitalOcean engineers understand how security events impact them. Do they need to worry about the next Redfish or Copy Fail CVEs? How does RetBleed impact DigitalOcean’s fleet?
Required qualifications:
- Deep familiarity with at least one kernel security feature (ex: AppArmor SELinux Landlock etc.)
- Capable of assessing and understanding the performance implications of code changes to virtualization stacks (especially in Qemu and KVM) built from hands-on experience. Experience
- A record of partnering with internal engineering teams to tackle security problems across an entire stack with empathy and creativity. Engineering teams are our partners not our adversaries.
- Ability to clearly communicate security topics and vulnerability classes (e.g. memory corruption privilege escalation TOCTOU etc) and ability to provide actionable direction to product teams.
- Working knowledge of modern development concepts (virtualized environments containerization continuous integration + delivery).
Preferred qualifications:
- 5+ years of writing systems level code (embedded systems kernel assembly or similar).
- Experience guiding software teams on secure architecture design.
- Written code for an embedded system (raspberry pi arduino etc).
- Experience building or reviewing threat models and ability to craft malicious user attacker and abuse/misuse cases.
- An understanding of patches and mitigations for hardware side-channel attacks.
- Familiarity with object oriented and functional programming concepts particularly with languages such as Go Rust or C.
- $140000 - $175000
*This is a remote role
JR: 2026-8011
#LI-Remote
- 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 10000+ 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.
Skills Required
- Deep familiarity with at least one kernel security feature (e.g. AppArmor SELinux Landlock)
- Ability to assess and understand performance implications of code changes to virtualization stacks especially QEMU and KVM from hands-on experience
- Record of partnering with internal engineering teams to tackle security problems across an entire stack with empathy and creativity
- Ability to clearly communicate security topics and vulnerability classes (e.g. memory corruption privilege escalation TOCTOU) and provide actionable direction to product teams
- Working knowledge of modern development concepts (virtualized environments containerization continuous integration and delivery)
- 5+ years of writing systems-level code (embedded systems kernel assembly or similar)
- Experience guiding software teams on secure architecture design
- Experience writing code for embedded systems (Raspberry Pi Arduino etc.)
- Experience building or reviewing threat models and crafting malicious user attacker and abuse/misuse cases
- Understanding of patches and mitigations for hardware side-channel attacks
- Familiarity with object-oriented and functional programming concepts and languages such as Go Rust or C
What the Team is Saying
What We Do
DigitalOcean is the Inference Cloud — a full-stack production-ready cloud platform built to run AI applications with predictable performance sustainable economics and radically simpler operations at scale. We are built for teams turning AI into real products — not just training models. Our advantage is not fewer features but fewer failure modes when operating AI at scale — combining minimal operational overhead predictable cost efficiency and a full-stack cloud that works as a system. Hyperscalers are broad by design. Neoclouds are infrastructure-first. DigitalOcean is inference-first — with a real cloud underneath. It combines inference-optimized compute managed inference software and integrated cloud capabilities that reduce operational burden for teams running real workloads. Inference is the foundation—not the boundary. Everything else builds on top of it.
Why Work With Us
At DO we do career-defining work. We innovate with AI and build cutting-edge tech. Our rewards to match that intensity - to motivate you recognize your impact and give you what you need to thrive. If you have a growth mindset like to think big and bold and are energized by the fast-paced environment you'll find your place here.
Gallery
DigitalOcean Offices
Remote Workspace
Employees work remotely.
We commit to both remote work and in-person collaboration. These ways of working are dependent on specific roles and are mutually agreed upon by employees. In the US we are mainly remote. In our APAC locations we have a hybrid in-office approach.
Explore More
Date Posted
06/27/2026
Views
0