Staff Hardware 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 want people who are passionate about optimizing and troubleshooting data center hardware at mega-scale so our customers don’t have to worry!

What You’ll Be Doing

Lead projects with internal stakeholders to gather product requirements for hardware designs to meet the DigitalOcean mission

Lead projects with vendors on specifying, qualifying, onboarding, and delivering new hardware to the DigitalOcean ecosystem

Work on the development and execution of a hardware development roadmap to support product requirements

Partner with peer teams to develop tools and processes to orchestrate scaling of the hardware platform

Lead projects on internal roadmap to improve team-owned services for both internal stakeholders and customers

Act as Tier 3 escalation on-call for triage, investigation, and resolution of system hardware issues in the DigitalOcean fleet (both customer-facing and internal)

Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation with other members of the team

Improve existing firmware and hardware configuration automation/validation, for both hardware platforms and components (such as NIC, Storage and BMC)

Engage with hardware vendors about new automation features and existing bugs

Mentor other DigitalOcean employees on configuration management best practices, troubleshooting intuition, hardware design, and clean documentation

What We’ll Expect From You

Technical Degree (BS Computer Science/Engineering) or equivalent practical experience

Strong understanding of x86 server hardware architecture and subsystems. Ideally, you’ve worked with non-x86 hardware too!

Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and maintaining liquid-cooled server solutions in datacenter environments

Demonstrated professional proficiency in configuration management best-practices (we use Ansible and Chef)

Experience automating server components at large-scale using industry-standard tooling (Redfish, IPMI, etc) including a deep understanding of benchmarking, automating test frameworks, and process automation in general

Practical knowledge of PXE boot, UEFI, Linux/OS boot, AMI/OEM BIOS distributions, OpenBMC/AMI/OEM BMC implementations, RAID and other storage resiliency technologies, and the full Network stack- from NIC firmware to TCP/IP

Adept at Linux (or Unix) operating systems. You’ll be spending a lot of time working in one!

Comfortable with version control systems (we use Git) and proficient in at least one programming language (such as Python or Go)

Ability to participate in 24/7 on-call rotation with other members of the team

Excellent communication skills, both within the team and with the broader company

Have an insatiable passion for hardware, both new and old

Compensation Range

$191,000 - $239,000

This is a hybrid role

JR: 2026-7884

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.