Philip Vaccaro

Philip G. Vaccaro

Compute control planes at fleet scale — multi-tenant provisioning, capacity, and lifecycle orchestration across millions of instances.

2M+active Droplets
500K+users served
56Mrequests/day
~80endpoints owned

Summary

12+ years building business-critical, reliable distributed systems at scale. I own the compute control plane for DigitalOcean's Droplet platform — the multi-tenant system that provisions, schedules, and manages the capacity and lifecycle of a 2M+ instance fleet, exposed through the public v2 API and gRPC microservices running on Kubernetes. It's the foundational platform external customers and internal teams build on. I led the migration to a centralized gRPC control plane, drive fleet-wide agility, efficiency, and reliability, and own incident response across the estate. Previously staff-level at QuSecure architecting a cryptographic agility control plane. Stack: Go, Java, Rust on Kubernetes, with gRPC/Protobuf, Kafka, Redis, Envoy, PostgreSQL/CockroachDB, and Prometheus/Grafana/OpenSearch.

Experience

DigitalOcean — Droplet Compute / AI Infrastructure

Senior Software Engineer II (IC4)Feb 2025 — Present

  • Own the compute control plane for the Droplet platform — ~80 HTTP and gRPC endpoints across 11 services that provision, schedule, and manage the capacity and lifecycle of a multi-tenant fleet of 2M+ active instances and 500K+ users, sustaining 650 RPS (56M req/day).
  • Built capacity controls that keep the fleet ahead of demand — proactive quota and capacity-limit signals for enterprise customers (including GPU / AI-infrastructure capacity), surfacing risk before it impacts workloads.
  • Led migration of Droplet infrastructure from direct PostgreSQL/CockroachDB access to a centralized gRPC control plane on Kubernetes — decoupling provisioning and lifecycle services, improving fleet-wide agility, isolation, and fault-tolerance.
  • Lead P0/P1 incident response across the compute estate — root-cause analysis, postmortems, and metrics-based alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch) that measurably reduced MTTR.

QuSecure — Post-Quantum Cryptography

Senior Staff Software EngineerMar 2024 — Feb 2025

  • Architected and delivered the cryptographic agility control plane enabling seamless post-quantum algorithm migration across distributed network infrastructure; presented architecture and progress directly to executive leadership.
  • Built Go and Rust gRPC microservices handling cryptographic operations at sub-millisecond latency; defined API contracts and code review standards for the services team.
  • Identified and optimized a critical-path query bottleneck, cutting P99 latency by 50% and improving end-to-end system throughput.

QuSecure — Post-Quantum Cryptography

Staff Software EngineerOct 2022 — Mar 2024

  • Stood up the team's first comprehensive monitoring, distributed tracing, and alerting infrastructure — giving the engineering org its first end-to-end view of production system health and reliability.
  • Built end-to-end distributed orchestration: Protocol Buffer schemas, REST and gRPC APIs, and Redis-backed pub/sub event streaming.
  • Developed post-quantum TLS cipher libraries in Go, compiled via cgo and integrated as custom Envoy proxy plugins for transparent L4/L7 cryptographic interception; authored architecture documents and established the team's design review practice.

DigitalOcean — Droplet Compute

Software Engineer (IC2)Sep 2021 — Oct 2022

  • Built event-driven Droplet provisioning and lifecycle workflows on Apache Kafka — the orchestration path that schedules and reconciles compute instances at high volume across the fleet.
  • Designed and built a distributed credential-management service for SSH key lifecycle, with gRPC APIs orchestrating key state across the compute fleet; defined service authentication patterns later adopted as team standards.
Earlier experience (2013 — 2021)

A mix of contract, consulting, and product roles — between research stints and before joining DigitalOcean.

Martin Federal Consulting — on contract to Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Software Engineer2018 — 2021

  • Built Java REST APIs and data models for ORNL research systems, supporting national-laboratory scientific computing infrastructure.

Jewelry Television — e-commerce platform

Software Engineer2018 — 2021

  • Developed Java microservices and ETL pipelines powering the JTV e-commerce backend.

General Commission · Data Tapestry

Software Engineer2018 — 2021

  • Built distributed transaction systems in Python on a NATS event bus, plus Go REST API services.

Siemens Corporate Research & Molecular Imaging

Software EngineerMar 2013 — Jun 2015

  • Developed C++ libraries for real-time medical image processing; automated upgrade of 250+ imaging systems.

Selected Work

Research

Graduate Research Assistant — Innovative Computing Laboratory, UT KnoxvilleAug 2015 — Apr 2018

  • Advisor: Prof. Jack Dongarra. Contributed the PAPI powercap component (above) and researched runtime power optimization in HPC environments.

Co-op — Sandia National LaboratoriesJan 2016 — Jun 2016

  • Developed C library for processing multi-rate FPGA sensor and telemetry data in the TITANS program.

Education

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

M.S. Computer Science, 2018  ·  B.S. Computer Science, 2014 (Cum Laude)

Thesis: Power-cognizant Computing