Security Software Engineer

Dive in and do the best work of your career rney 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.

As a Staff Security Software Engineer at Digital Ocean, 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 Digital Ocean 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.

• Research and design automated approaches to detecting and actioning abuse and misuse of Digital Ocean 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 Digital Ocean scales. All while being mindful that security should be an efficiency enabler for the business, not an obstacle.

• 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, Big Query)
• 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.
• Experience with microservice architectures, asynchronous and event-driven processing, and synchronous gRPC/HTTP-based requests.
• Experience in building secure by default services and applications.
• Familiarity with technologies such as gRPC, Docker, Elasticsearch, Prometheus/Victoria Metrics, Kubernetes, and Git Hub Actions.
• Experience with Looker, Snowflake, dbt, and Airflow

Compensation Range:

• $166,400 - $208,000

* This is a remote role

• We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a…