Senior Customer Success Engineer I - Kubernetes

About the role

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 Senior Customer Success Engineer I – Kubernetes who is passionate about cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, and delivering exceptional customer experiences, while providing high-touch, white-glove support to strategic accounts.

As a Senior Customer Success Engineer I at DigitalOcean, you will play a critical role in supporting and empowering customers to successfully run production workloads on Kubernetes. You will work closely with customers to troubleshoot complex issues, optimize cluster performance, and guide them in adopting best practices across Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

In this role, you will bring deep technical expertise in Kubernetes and act as an escalation point for complex, business-critical customer scenarios. You will collaborate cross-functionally with Product and Engineering to drive customer outcomes, influence platform improvements, and mentor junior engineers. This role reports to the Manager, Customer Success Engineer.

What You'll Do

Deliver advanced technical support for Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, including cluster provisioning, container products, networking, scaling, workload orchestration, and container registry.

Troubleshoot complex production issues affecting cluster performance, pod scheduling, ingress, storage, and security

Guide strategic customers through onboarding, migrations, and adoption of Kubernetes, helping them design scalable, resilient, and secure architectures while ensuring smooth production readiness and resolving complex escalations.

Serve as the escalation point for high-impact and business-critical Kubernetes issues, driving resolution through coordination with Engineering, and Product teams

Guide customers in designing scalable, resilient, and secure Kubernetes architectures on DigitalOcean

Mentor IC1/IC2 engineers and drive team growth by contributing to documentation, playbooks, and leverage automation tools to optimize workflows and knowledge sharing

Partner cross-functionally with leadership, Product, and Engineering to shape support strategy, feature needs, and best practices for Managed Kubernetes.

Use observability and monitoring tools to diagnose system behavior and performance bottlenecks

Key Metrics

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Time to Resolution / SLA adherence

Escalation quality and resolution effectiveness

Documentation and knowledge base contributions

Customer adoption of best practices

What You'll Add to DigitalOcean

Required Experience & skills

4–7+ years of experience in technical support, SRE, DevOps, or cloud engineering roles

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with hands-on expertise in managing and troubleshooting production clusters.

Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes (cluster management, deployments, troubleshooting) in production environments

Deep understanding of Kubernetes components (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager, kubelet.)

Solid foundation in Linux systems, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems

Strong knowledge of networking concepts including Kubernetes networking, ingress controllers, load balancing, and storage solutions (persistent volumes, CSI drivers)

Expertise in troubleshooting across application, container, and infrastructure layers

Customer-first mindset with the ability to manage high-pressure, business-critical situations and delivering great support experiences

Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly

Ability to work independently, take ownership, and collaborate across teams in a fast-paced environment

Preferred Qualification:

Experience with managed Kubernetes platforms (DOKS, EKS, GKE, AKS) and multi-cloud or hybrid environments

Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform, Helm, or Ansible.

Experience with CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux)

Exposure to observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry)

Knowledge of Kubernetes security best practices (RBAC, network policies, secrets management)

Contributions to open-source projects, blogs, or documentation in Kubernetes/cloud-native ecosystems

At least one of the Advanced Kubernetes certifications (CKAD, CKS)

Bonus: Experience with one or more programming/scripting languages (Go, Python, Bash)

JR: [2026-7644]

#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.