Staff Software Engineer-Security Products

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer (IC5) to join our Security Products team, spanning Identity and Access Management (IAM), Key Management Systems (KMS), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM). Security Products is the trust layer for DigitalOcean's platform — the systems you will influence protect every customer workload, every cryptographic key, every identity assertion, and every access decision made across the platform, including our rapidly growing AI inference stack.

This is not a role scoped to a single product or team. As a Staff Engineer in Security Products, you will set the technical direction across the entire security products organization, resolve architectural conflicts that no individual team can resolve alone, and build the connective tissue between identity, key management, and posture systems that makes DigitalOcean's security platform coherent rather than fragmented. You will be the primary technical partner to the Sr. Director of Security Products in shaping multi-year strategy, and you will be the engineering voice representing security architecture in DigitalOcean's most consequential platform decisions.If you are a seasoned security engineer with a track record of technical leadership that spans organizational boundaries — and who wants to define what a modern cloud security platform looks like for the AI-native era — this is the role for you.

What You'll Do

• Define Security Products Architecture: Own the multi-year technical strategy across IAM, KMS, CSPM, and ISPM — ensuring these systems compose coherently rather than operating as isolated products. Identify the seams where identity, key management, and posture signal must integrate, and drive the architectural decisions that close them.
• Lead the Agent Identity & Trust Architecture: Define how DigitalOcean's platform establishes, validates, and governs identity for non-human workloads — including agentic AI systems, inference pipelines, and service-to-service trust. This spans SPIFFE/SPIRE-style workload identity, short-lived credential issuance, scoped JWT attestation, and the policy engine that governs what agents are permitted to do and access.
• Own Cross-Domain Security Platform Decisions: Serve as the primary technical arbitrator for decisions that span more than one Security Products team — including how key material is bound to identity assertions, how CSPM findings feed into access policy enforcement, how ISPM risk signals propagate into real-time authorization decisions, and how audit evidence flows across all four domains in a compliance-coherent way.
• Shape DigitalOcean's Security Posture Strategy: Define the technical architecture for how DigitalOcean discovers, evaluates, and remediates posture risk across its platform — spanning CSPM (misconfigured infrastructure) and ISPM (over-privileged identities, orphaned credentials, policy drift). Drive the integration of posture signal into identity and access enforcement so that policy is adaptive, not static.
• Drive Protocol and Standards Adoption: Own the technical strategy for security standards adoption across the platform — evaluating and standardizing on OIDC, SAML, SCIM, WIMSE, OAuth Token Exchange, KMIP, PKCS#11, and emerging NIST PQC standards. Represent DigitalOcean's technical interests in external standards conversations where relevant.
• Establish Engineering Standards Across Security Products: Define and socialize cryptographic engineering practices, identity protocol patterns, policy authoring standards, and posture evaluation frameworks — raising the engineering floor across all Security Products teams and influencing the broader DO engineering organization.
• Partner with Compliance and Executive Leadership: Translate security platform architecture into compliance posture and business impact for CISO, CPTO, and board-level audiences. Own the technical framing for HIPAA Covered Product expansion, SOC 2 control engineering, and emerging regulatory requirements as they intersect with identity and key management.
• Mentor and Multiply: Coach IC3 and IC4 engineers across Security Products teams on system design, security engineering rigor, and cross-functional technical communication. Act as a technical multiplier — raising the capability of the organization, not just delivering individually.

What You'll Add to DigitalOcean

• Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years of sustained focus on security-critical systems — spanning at least two of: Identity/IAM, cryptographic systems/KMS, cloud security posture, or infrastructure security — at cloud or enterprise scale.
• Language Expert: Expert-level proficiency in Go, with deep experience building and operating security-critical, high-scale distributed services in production.
• Identity Authority: Deep knowledge of identity protocols (OIDC, OAuth2, SAML, SCIM) and access control models (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC); able to design novel identity systems — including workload and agent identity — not just implement existing patterns.
• Cryptography Authority: Sound applied cryptography fundamentals — symmetric and asymmetric primitives, key derivation hierarchies, authenticated encryption, envelope encryption patterns — and a track record of designing cryptographic systems correctly under real operational constraints.
• Posture Systems: Experience designing or operating CSPM or ISPM systems — including resource discovery, policy evaluation at scale, misconfiguration detection, and risk signal aggregation. Familiarity with cloud resource models (DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP, or Azure) and the control frameworks that govern them (CIS Benchmarks, NIST CSF, or equivalent).
• Cross-Domain Integration: Demonstrated ability to design systems where identity, key management, and posture signals compose — rather than operating in isolation. Candidates who have worked at the intersection of two or more of these domains are strongly preferred.
• Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven ability to design and operate systems at cloud scale — handling consensus, replication, partitioning, and failure recovery under real production conditions — with security and auditability as first-class constraints.
• Organizational Influence: Track record of driving technical alignment across multiple engineering teams or organizations — including resolving architectural conflicts, establishing cross-team standards, and influencing roadmaps beyond your direct area of ownership.
• Communication: Demonstrated ability to translate complex security platform strategy into business impact and compliance posture for executive and board-level audiences.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Open Policy Agent (OPA), Rego, or other policy-as-code frameworks at production scale.
• Familiarity with SPIFFE/SPIRE, WIMSE, or other workload identity frameworks.
• Experience with HSMs (Thales/Luna, AWS CloudHSM, or equivalent) and production-grade key management platforms.
• Familiarity with post-quantum cryptography standards (NIST PQC: ML-KEM, ML-DSA) and migration planning for production key hierarchies.
• Experience with PKCS#11, KMIP, or other KMS/HSM interoperability standards.
• Background contributing to open-source security projects or engaging with standards bodies (IETF, OpenID Foundation, NIST).
• Prior experience designing security platform strategy for AI-native or inference-heavy workloads.
• Background supporting HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, or FedRAMP compliance programs from an engineering ownership perspective.

*This job is located in Bengaluru, India

JR: 2026-7959

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