Principal Architect
$235,200–$294,000 year
Remote · Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Job Summary
Principal Architect / Staff Software Engineer (IC6) responsible for owning the IAM and KMS platforms at DigitalOcean. Define and drive multi-year technical roadmaps for authentication, authorization, secrets management, and cryptographic key lifecycle across a global, multi-tenant cloud. Architect high-availability, low-latency identity and key management services in Go for massive scale, design secure token exchange patterns for agentic AI workflows, and evolve a robust, multi-tenant KMS with envelope encryption and HSM integration. Lead cross-team implementation with partners across Inference, Billing, DOKS, and Platform Security; set engineering standards; mentor senior engineers; drive RFCs and architectural strategy to enable security as a driver of developer velocity. Comfortable communicating with senior leadership and delivering production-grade platform capabilities. Nice-to-haves include SPIFFE/SPIRE, Vault-like secret management experience, and contributions to open-source identity/cryptography projects. Compensation range: $235,200 - $294,000. This is a remote role.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of software engineering experience
- at least 4+ years focused on Identity (AuthN/AuthZ), Key Management, or high-scale distributed systems in a cloud/IaaS environment
- expert-level proficiency in Go and deep experience with gRPC microservices architecture
- deep knowledge of identity protocols (OIDC, OAuth2, SAML, SCIM) and access control models (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC)
- hands-on experience with key management infrastructure (envelope encryption, HSM integration, BYOK/CMEK)
- experience with distributed systems including consensus, replication, and partitioning at scale
- cloud-native experience with Kubernetes, SQL (MySQL), and Terraform
- ability to write RFCs, present architectural strategy, and lead multi-team initiatives
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