Director of Engineering - Security Products

We are looking for a visionary Director of Engineering to lead and scale our Security Products engineering organization in India. In this role, you will own the end-to-end engineering strategy and execution for our security product portfolio, protecting millions of customers globally. You will build and lead multiple high-performing teams, shape the technical direction of our security platform, and partner closely with senior product, design, and business leadership to drive DigitalOcean's security vision forward.

What you'll do

• Define and own the multi-year engineering strategy and roadmap for Security Products in India, aligning closely with global security and product leadership.
• Lead, grow, and inspire a multi-team engineering organization spanning threat detection, identity management, data protection, and security infrastructure.
• Partner with VP-level and C-suite stakeholders across Product, Security Architecture, and GTM to translate business priorities into executable technical plans.
• Drive organizational design, headcount planning, and talent strategy to scale the India engineering function in support of global security goals.
• Establish engineering excellence across teams - including coding standards, architectural reviews, incident management, and operational health benchmarks.
• Champion a culture of security-first thinking, proactive risk management, and continuous improvement across the full development lifecycle.
• Lead sustaining engineering strategy: own technical debt reduction programs, aging ticket resolution, and long-term platform health.
• Manage delivery accountability across multiple concurrent programs, ensuring on-time preview and GA launches with proactive mitigation of cross-team dependencies and risks.
• Recruit, retain, and develop senior engineering talent; drive performance management, career frameworks, and succession planning for the India org.
• Represent the India engineering organization in global leadership forums; act as the primary escalation point for security product engineering decisions.

What You'll Add to DigitalOcean

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 6+ years in senior engineering leadership or management roles, including managing managers.
• Demonstrated track record of building and scaling engineering organizations (50+ engineers) delivering complex, cloud-scale security products or distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in security protocols, cryptography, identity management, and modern application security architecture.
• Proven ability to influence and align senior cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Legal, Security, Finance) in a global organizational structure.
• 8+ years of experience building products at security companies or within security-focused engineering functions.
• Strong technical fluency in Go and JavaScript/Node.js; ability to engage credibly in architecture and design reviews.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems at scale: consensus, replication, partitioning, and consistency.
• Production experience with Apache Flink and advanced Kafka for high-volume event stream processing.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise running security-critical workloads at scale.
• Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) with strong command of cloud security models; Infrastructure as Code expertise (Terraform, Helm, Chef).
• Experience building and overseeing systems handling millions of events per second.
• Broad familiarity with the security tooling landscape (SIEM, WAF, IDS/IPS, vulnerability scanners, CSPM).
• Exceptional communication, executive presence, and the ability to operate effectively across time zones in a globally distributed company.
• Track record of operating with high ownership and bias for action in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience architecting large-scale distributed systems and microservices platforms.
• Deep expertise in cryptography and secure communication protocols.
• Contributions to open-source security projects or active participation in the broader security research community.
• Experience leading engineering through hypergrowth or significant organizational transformation..

*This job is located in Bengaluru, India

#LI-Hybrid