Senior Software Engineer II (Performance Engineering)

We are looking for an empathetic engineer who is familiar with some (not all) of our stack and tools, has a willingness and aptitude to grow into the role, and is comfortable working remotely.

You will report to the Senior Engineering Manager of the Kernel and Performance Engineering Group, and you will act as a contributor on the Performance Engineering Team.  You will contribute to delivering on our mission by ensuring DigitalOcean’s operating system and virtualization stack is highly performant and competitive across the variety of DigitalOcean product offerings.

The Performance Engineering Team collects performance data about the hypervisor servers (and other servers) within the fleet of servers that make up the DigitalOcean Cloud.  The Team uses that data to form analytics and tell stories about how the fleet of servers is performing, from which human and automated decisions are made to balance performance with capacity.  The Team interacts with a wide variety of engineering and other teams to effect the performance decisions that make DigitalOcean a desirable platform for our customers.

We use Python, Go, C, and similar languages to write tools to accomplish our mission.  Our fleet of servers are Linux, and performance metrics and tuning are made in the context of the Linux kernel.  And we highly value collaboration with open source Linux communities.

We use Artifactory as our package repository for controlling the configurations of packages deployed to our fleet of servers. We use Github Actions and Concourse to synchronize Ubuntu packages, and to build and verify internal packages and images. Shell scripting is used in our CI/CD pipelines, as well as in so many other aspects of working with our fleet of servers. Most of our tooling runs within Docker containers in these CI systems. Chef is used to manage apt configuration in the fleet, including gradual rollout of new packages.

DigitalOcean’s Internal Culture and Tooling

DigitalOcean teams communicate primarily via Slack. Our team makes lighter use of Jira and GSuite. We strive to make our work-life balance comfortable, and aim to scope work appropriately so that everyone works at a healthy pace. You can expect to be on-call periodically once you are ready, but shouldn’t expect to be paged often.

DigitalOcean’s observability platform comprises Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and Elasticsearch.  Knowing any of these tools is a bonus, because every service at DO is generally expected to use this platform.

The Kernel and Performance Engineering group is an arm of Infrastructure Fleet Engineering, aimed at delivering and sustaining the low-level software stack for all of DigitalOcean’s products and services. The Infrastructure Fleet Engineering group is made up of a diverse group of around sixty engineers located across the US, Canada, and Europe. Within the group, there are growth opportunities along several tracks (i.e. Tech Leader, Subject Matter Expert (SME), Project Management, Engineering Manager, etc).

While work will vary based on quarterly priorities and initiatives, some examples include:

• Development of telemetry for fleet performance analysis
• Developing and maintaining realistic benchmark applications that emulate our customers’ environments
• Strategizing performance characteristics and parameters for new and future product offerings
• Triaging and fixing operating system issues impacting the performance of product offerings
• Performance analysis of OS stack and fleet hardware updates
• Tight collaboration with the Kernel, Virtualization, and other engineering teams for producing Service Level Agreements for customers based on Performance
• Consultation for product performance regressions and new product performance acceptance criteria
• Visualizing and presenting performance data to be leveraged for technology and business decisions
• 5-20% of your time is spent on innovation, education, and/or open source

• Professional experience in performance engineering, with insights into collecting, tracing, measuring, analyzing, tuning, and/or modeling
• Proficiency with Python
• Familiarity with data analytics
• A track record of improving systems performance
• Experience as a developer / engineer in a large scale, distributed environment
• Experience writing secure, testable and robust code
• Deep understanding of Linux and OS internals
• Experience proactively diagnosing performance issues across all layers of the stack 
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• A desire to work with a respectful and inclusive team

• We reward our employees. The base salary range for this position is between $145,000-$185,000 based on relevant years of experience and skills. The salary range for this role is specific to candidates located within the U.S. and will vary for candidates outside the U.S.. The salary range for this position is based on relevant years of experience and skills. Employees 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 grants of equity upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• We value development. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that is always challenging our teams and employees to continuously grow. We maintain a growth mindset in everything we do and invest deeply in employee development through formalized mentorship and other internal programs. We provide all employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
• We care about your well-being. In addition to cash and equity compensation, we also offer employees a competitive array of benefits. In the United States, these include health insurance, unlimited vacation, retirement benefits, a generous parental leave program, and additional resources to support employees' overall well-being. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary in other countries due to local regulations and preferences.
• We value diversity and inclusivity. We are an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

*This is a remote role

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