Zero to Deploy: Launching Your Career at DigitalOcean

Diving into the professional world is a big moment for recent graduates. At DigitalOcean, we believe the best way to become a world-class builder is to build. Our entry-level roles are designed to treat you as a core member of the team from Day One.

We sat down with 3 first-year builders, Isabel Shic, Junior Product Designer, Mitali Soni, Software Engineer, and Yeshvanth Raju Kurapati, Software Engineer, to hear about how they transitioned from graduation to making a production-grade impact at DigitalOcean. Their journeys show what it really means to start your career at DigitalOcean: ownership from day one, meaningful mentorship, and the opportunity to work on AI infrastructure.

Shipping real code

At DigitalOcean, employees solve real challenges from day one on the job. Cloud and AI-native disrupters are moving at lightning speed. We ship continuously so that new capabilities show up where customers need them - in core cloud, AI infrastructure, platforms, and agentic workflows.

For Mitali Soni, this meant working directly on AI infrastructure to help customers save costs.

“We were trying to build out an AI application where potential customers could upload their invoice, and on the back end, we infer the current usage and map that out with DigitalOcean’s offerings,” Mitali explains. “The project did end up going live. It’s out there on the internet for people to use, and it was a really nice feeling.”

Yeshvanth Raju Kurapati worked on critical stability features for the core platform, using Machine Learning to predict crashes.

“My first project was to build proactive remediation methods using ML for hypervisor crashes,” he says. “The system is live, and it helps prevent infrastructure failures before they impact customers.”

During Isabel Shic’s first week, she was already improving the onboarding flow. She started shaping the very first interaction users have with the experience.

“I immediately saw it in the product a couple of weeks later, which was super exciting,” Isabel recalls. “It set the tone that I, as a new hire, have the opportunity to make an impact on your team.”

High performance meets community

Building complex cloud infrastructure requires bold thinking, but it also requires a culture of mentorship that ensures high expectations are matched with high support. Here, you join a strong community of people who care for one another and our customers.

For Isabel, this support came from colleagues at every level and function:

“I noticed senior designers who really went out of their way to help me navigate this new experience,” she says. “Even non-designers and my product managers are consistently kind and positive. That’s made a really big impact on working my first full-time job.”

Yeshvanth echoes this sentiment, noting that the culture encouraged curiosity over perfection.

“On my first day, no questions were considered silly. We had the freedom to take bold steps and experiment.”

This balance of simplicity and care is what allowed Mitali to grow technically without feeling overwhelmed.

“People really took time to review the code thoroughly and genuinely cared for my growth, and not just the output,” she notes.

Skills that scale

University teaches you the theory; DigitalOcean teaches you the scale. Our commitment to all employees, especially those in their early careers, is that they will join DigitalOcean and do meaningful, challenging, career-defining work. The work you do here will serve you for decades. In their first year, our new Sharks have already learned skills that will serve them for decades.

Mitali gained a new perspective on data architecture.

“One of the most important things I learned was how to design scalable data pipelines and think in terms of data quality, schema design, and observability,” she says.

For Yeshvanth, it was about mastering new languages and tools that are now essential to his full-time role.

“I had to learn Ruby, which was a programming language I wasn’t familiar with… Now Ruby is a key part of my daily workflow for scripting, automation, and building infrastructure,” he explains.

And for Isabel, the growth was about communication.

“I would say the biggest skill I learned was how to present my work and how to tell a story,” she says. “We work on difficult technical projects, and that makes it really important to break things down in digestible ways.”

Ready to build your future?

These journeys are just a glimpse into the kind of impact you can make at DigitalOcean. Watch Isabel, Yeshvanth, and Mitali’s stories to see firsthand what it means to build your future with us.

If you have a growth mindset, want hands-on experience with AI, cloud infrastructure, and production-grade systems, you’ll find your place here.

Explore our career opportunities!