Senior Software Engineer II, Virtualization

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.

On this team at DigitalOcean, you will contribute to the foundation of our core compute cloud: the virtualization stack. The team's mission is to provide an extremely reliable, secure, and feature-complete low-level software stack for DigitalOcean's virtualization product offerings. The team works broadly across the company with our hardware, kernel, performance, observability, GPU/AI, and up-stack service teams to provide a platform to meet our stakeholders' requirements. Because we are responsible for the software which hosts every DigitalOcean droplet, we develop and operate software at an extreme scale.

Job Duties and Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, and implement the IT systems underlying DigitalOcean's core virtual machine ("Droplet") product.

Work with DigitalOcean's Observability teams to collect and analyze metrics regarding DigitalOcean's products and infrastructure; utilize this data to improve DigitalOcean's products and services.

Engage in peer reviews for suggested changes to DigitalOcean systems.

Contribute to retrospectives enabling DigitalOcean to continuously improve software engineering processes in an agile manner.

Develop and lead execution of test plans in order to allow DigitalOcean to continue to provide reliable service to customers and ensure any customer-impacting incidents will not be repeated.

Maintain DigitalOcean's existing low-level virtual machine stack, while preparing it to support future software updates and new hardware.

Accelerate the virtualization of next generation GPU enabled platforms that power AI/ML workloads.

Work with hardware engineering teams and vendors to validate new hardware. Optimize performance while maintaining DO’s high security standards.

Collaborate with open source Linux, QEMU and libvirt communities to drive the evolution of Linux virtualization technologies and incorporate them into the DO fleet.

Work with cross team partners such as product management to unlock new capabilities within our virtualization stack with evolving hardware.

Backport, build, and deploy software patches in order to support new features, backport bug fixes, and resolve security issues.

Suggest and implement improvements to our code release pipelines.

Contribute to a regular on-call rotation schedule.

Required Qualifications

Strong understanding of Linux based operating systems; comfortable developing and operating software on Linux.

Strong proficiency in C.

Proven track record of solving problems at scale . You’ll be involved in driving homogenization across the fleet while making sustainable decisions for the organization moving forward.

A strong security mindset. You are proactive when it comes to identifying and implementing security best practices in your domain.

You are a terrific cross team collaborator. So much of this role involves interactions with other engineers and teams.

Recommended Qualifications

Deep experience with the internals of QEMU, KVM, Linux kernel and libvirt.

Experience with Debian packaging

Experience with Go, Python, and/or Ruby

Experience with Chef, AWX, and/or Kubernetes

Experience with GPU virtualization

Experience with Firecracker microVMs

Compensation Range:

$167,000 - $209,000

*This is a hybrid role

JR: 2026-7818

#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.