Lead architecture and technical direction for DigitalOcean's Identity and Access Management platform. Design scalable authn/authz primitives, workload identity, federation protocols, and policy engines. Drive cross-org decisions, mentor senior engineers, and communicate strategy to executive leadership while ensuring secure, multi-tenant, cloud-native operations.
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 seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Customer Trust & Engineering team working on Identity and Access Management. IAM is the bedrock of trust at DigitalOcean; our services sit in the critical path of every request, authorizing billions of transactions per second with single-digit millisecond latency.
In this role, you will set the technical direction for DigitalOcean's Identity platform not just for the IAM team, but across the engineering organization. You will define the architecture for our next-generation identity primitives, drive cross-org alignment on how identity intersects with AI workloads, billing, and access governance, and establish the engineering standards that the team builds against. If you are a seasoned engineer who wants to combine deep technical expertise with broad organizational impact, this is the role for you.
What You’ll Do- Define Platform Architecture: Set the technical direction for DigitalOcean's Identity platform; designing for hyperscale, multi-tenancy, and the evolving requirements of AI-native enterprise customers. Your architecture decisions will span multiple teams and multi-year roadmaps.
- Lead Agent Identity Strategy: Architect the IAM foundations for agentic AI workloads; including workload identity (SPIFFE/SPIRE-style), short-lived credential issuance, delegation chains, and identity context propagation across inference pipelines. This is greenfield, high-impact work.
- Drive Protocol Adoption: Own the technical strategy for identity protocol adoption across DigitalOcean; evaluating and standardizing on OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and emerging standards; driving federation architecture for strategic enterprise and global partners.
- Evolve the Policy Engine: Define the long-term architecture of our authorization layer; including compound RBAC/ABAC/PBAC models, hierarchical resource scoping, and network-aware access conditions; ensuring it scales to serve both platform-internal and customer-facing use cases.
- Shape Cross-Org Technical Decisions: Serve as a primary technical voice in cross-functional design reviews spanning IAM, Inference, Billing, and DOKS. Identify and resolve architectural conflicts before they become production incidents.
- Establish Engineering Standards: Define and socialize engineering best practices for the IAM domain; from credential lifecycle management to policy authoring patterns — that raise the floor for the entire team.
- Mentor Senior Engineers: Coach IC2 and IC3 engineers on system design, security engineering, and technical communication; serve as a multiplier for the team's overall capability.
- Translate Strategy to Leadership: Communicate identity platform strategy and investment rationale to senior leadership (VP, CISO, CPTO level), framing technical decisions in terms of security posture, customer trust, and business impact.
- Experience: 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years focused on Identity (AuthN/AuthZ), Security Products, or high-scale Distributed Systems at cloud or enterprise scale.
- Language Expert: Expert-level proficiency in Go and deep experience with gRPC microservices architecture at scale.
- Identity Authority: Deep knowledge of identity protocols (OIDC, OAuth2, SAML, SCIM) and access control models (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC); able to design novel identity systems, not just implement existing patterns.
- Workload Identity: Familiarity with workload identity standards (SPIFFE/SPIRE or equivalent) and experience designing non-human identity systems for distributed or agentic workloads.
- Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven ability to design and operate systems at cloud scale — handling consensus, replication, partitioning, and failure recovery under real production conditions.
- Cloud Native: Deep experience with Kubernetes, SQL (MySQL), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform); experience designing systems across multiple regions and availability zones.
- Communication: Demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus across org boundaries and translate identity platform strategy into business impact for executive audiences.
- Experience with Open Policy Agent (OPA), Rego, and policy-as-code at scale.
- Prior experience with SPIFFE/SPIRE or other workload identity frameworks.
- Familiarity with cloud-native deployment strategies (Canary/Blue-Green) and progressive delivery.
- Experience contributing to open-source identity projects or standards bodies (IETF, OpenID Foundation).
- Background in HIPAA, SOC 2, or other compliance frameworks as they intersect with identity and access controls.
*This job is located in Bengaluru, India
JR: 2026-7960
#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.
Similar Jobs at DigitalOcean
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Software • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Lead architecture and technical strategy for account management primitives (Teams, Organizations, Projects, Tags). Design hyperscale, multi-region systems, integrate across Identity, Billing, and AI/ML platforms, set engineering standards, mentor senior engineers, and communicate platform investment and risk to executive leadership.
Top Skills:
AWSAzureChefGCPGoHelmJavaScriptNode.jsPythonRustTerraform
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Software • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Lead design and implementation of high-throughput, cloud-native account and user systems (Teams, Organizations, Projects, Tags). Own architecture, scalability, reliability, incident response, and sustaining engineering. Collaborate with Product and Design, mentor engineers, and apply cloud security and Infrastructure-as-Code practices (Terraform, Helm, Chef) to harden account-management services.
Top Skills:
AWSAzureChefGCPGoHelmJavaScriptNode.jsPythonRustTerraform
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Software • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Build and maintain DigitalOcean's key management services in Go, implement key lifecycle workflows (generation, rotation, revocation), write tests, operate services (on-call), implement DEK wrapping/unwrapping, and collaborate with cross-functional teams while learning applied cryptography, HSM integration, and compliance.
Top Skills:
Aes-GcmAws KmsEcdsaFips 140-2Gcp Cloud KmsGoGrpcHashicorp VaultHsmKubernetesMySQLPostgresRsaTerraform
What you need to know about the Pune Tech Scene
Once a far-out concept, AI is now a tangible force reshaping industries and economies worldwide. While its adoption will automate some roles, AI has created more jobs than it has displaced, with an expected 97 million new roles to be created in the coming years. This is especially true in cities like Pune, which is emerging as a hub for companies eager to leverage this technology to develop solutions that simplify and improve lives in sectors such as education, healthcare, finance, e-commerce and more.
