13 Digitalocean Virtualization Engineer Jobs Hiring Near You

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