Staff Security Software Engineer

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. 

We are looking for a Staff Security Software Engineer who is passionate about detecting and mitigating abuse in the Cloud. 

As a Staff Security Software Engineer at DigitalOcean, you will join a dynamic team dedicated to revolutionizing cloud computing and AI. This role reports to the Senior Manager of Security Engineering within the Security organization. You should have experience developing and maintaining software systems in a complex, high-scale environment, analyzing outcomes and communicating insights to stakeholders, and rapidly devising solutions that are in alignment with overall business goals. Our team is focused on enabling DigitalOcean to scale safely by building systems that detect and prevent abuse on our platform. We highly value collaboration and growth, and work closely with other teams in the Security organization to deliver high quality solutions and also build tooling to boost their efficiency.

Our customers trust us with their data and operations, and we take that responsibility seriously. Security at DO means solving highly complex problems on a large scale that have real impact for our customers, our products, and for the larger internet community.

What You’ll Do:

• Design, develop, and deploy resilient services and tooling that provide security capabilities at scale, primarily in Go, with some work in Javascript and Python.


• Research and design automated approaches to detecting and actioning abuse and misuse of DigitalOcean products and services.


• Work with product and engineering teams to design and implement secure architectures.


• Design and build internal tools that enable our Security Operations Center to do more, faster.


• Measure the efficacy of our services and tools, using logs, metrics, and audit records, to drive reporting and decision-making, leading to iterative and transformative security improvements as DigitalOcean scales. All while being mindful that security should be an efficiency enabler for the business, not an obstacle.

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean:

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering projects, ideally with a security focus, in a complex, high-scale SaaS or IaaS environment. You are an expert in writing robust code with good test coverage and demonstrated success in delivering projects.


• Understanding of cloud-native services and infrastructure provisioning (e.g. compute, storage, networking).


• Deep familiarity with cloud services & infrastructure —compute, storage, network, managed services—and related abuse tactics , including DDoS, spamming, phishing, cryptomining, and bot networks.


• Strong analytical and reporting skills, with proficiency in SQL and data warehouse querying (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery)


• A customer-first mindset —you aim to maximize abuse prevention while avoiding false-positives that could impact high-value customers.


• Excellent communication and documentation skills; you can clearly articulate patterns, mitigation strategies, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. You have a record of partnering with internal engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders to gather requirements and tackle security problems across an entire stack with empathy and creativity.


• High integrity, strong judgment, and a track record of working independently on high-impact investigations and policy decisions.

Bonus qualifications:

• Experience with microservice architectures, asynchronous and event-driven processing, and synchronous gRPC/ requests.


• Experience in building secure by default services and applications.


• Familiarity with technologies such as gRPC, Docker, Elasticsearch, Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics, Kubernetes, and GitHub Actions.


• Experience with Looker, Snowflake, dbt, and Airflow

Compensation Range: 

• $183,040 - $228,800

*This is a hybrid role

JR: 2025-7129

#LI-Hybrid

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

• 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 10,000+ 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.