Director, Field & Event Marketing

Responsibilities

• Own DigitalOcean’s global event strategy across first-party, third-party, and field programs, from our flagship event, DigitalOcean Deploy, to founder dinners and AI industry conferences.
• Lead DigitalOcean’s presence at priority third-party events to drive brand awareness, technical credibility, and pipeline.
• Build a differentiated event strategy that balances proven formats with new ideas, experimental activations, customer showcases, guerrilla marketing tactics, and creative ways to engage AI builders and leaders.
• Partner with Sales, Product Marketing, Product, and Growth in order to align event investments with target accounts, pipeline tracking, and business goals.
• Design unique, high-quality attendee experiences that combine strong programming, technical depth, hands-on engagement, customer stories, creative concepts and smooth execution
• Build and scale the "Event Operating Model" in order to move fast, including planning processes, timelines, budget management, KPIs, and repeatable playbooks.
• Identify and secure technical speaking opportunities for our leaders in order to establish DigitalOcean as the credible home for production-grade AI inference.
• Build a vendor network and “event-in-a-box” program needed to elevate and scale repeatable, on-brand experiences across first and third-party events .
• Own the end-to-end event experience, including registration, event pages, attendee communications, livestreaming, on-site execution, follow-up, and reporting.
• Hire, lead, and develop a high-performing event marketing team .

Requirements

• 10+ years of B2B event marketing experience, ideally in cloud, AI, SaaS, or developer tools, with strong fluency in marketing to founders and technical audiences.
• Experience producing first-party events (from intimate to 5k+ attendees) and managing third-party sponsorships (30k+ attendees), from executive dinners and meetups to large-scale conferences.
• Experience creating a wide range of event formats, including flagship conferences, industry events, hands-on workshops, hackathons, customer programs, startup events, founder dinners, and executive experiences.
• A creative, experimental mindset: you know how to execute what works, but you also push beyond default formats to test new ideas, create standout experiences, and find what genuinely interests the audience.
• Owner-operator mindset: you take full accountability, bring structure to ambiguity, have a strong bias for action, and continuously improve how the team executes.
• Deep empathy for the attendee experience, with strong attention to detail; you believe that every aspect from the tone of an invite, to the room flow to the partners we work with and the follow-up with everyone involved is a reflection of our brand.
• Deep GTM fluency, with proven ability to connect events to pipeline, sales follow-up, revenue impact, and hands-on experience with platforms like Salesforce, Marketo, Cvent, Splash, Luma, and YouTube Live.
• Demonstrated vendor, agency, budget, and production management experience.
• Strong understanding of the San Francisco / Bay Area AI and Startup ecosystem.
• Curiosity, appetite for feedback, and a “leave it better than you found it” attitude.

Benefits

• We care about your well-being. Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few.
• We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.