[Hiring] Senior Engineer 2: AI Inference Engine Systems @DigitalOcean

Role Description

DigitalOcean is expanding its AI Infrastructure layer to support the next generation of AI-driven applications. We are seeking a Senior Engineer 2 to join our AI Inference Engine Systems team. In this role, you will be a key technical leader responsible for designing, developing, and delivering high-scale, resilient data plane services that power our "Inference as a Service" offering. You will work at the intersection of distributed systems and specialized AI hardware to ensure our customers can deploy and scale their models with industry-leading performance and reliability. This is a hands-on role, requiring you to be able to develop high quality software while availing of all the productivity boosts granted by the latest AI coding agents.

• Technical Leadership: Act as a technical leader on the team, driving the end-to-end design, development, and delivery of critical data plane components hosting large generative AI models.
• System Design: Architect and refine system design proposals for our high-scale, multi-tenant AI inference cloud ecosystem, ensuring they meet rigorous availability and resiliency standards.
• Performance Optimization: Implement and optimize distributed inference hosting using techniques like tensor/data parallelism, KV cache optimizations, and smart routing.
• Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with Product Managers, customer-facing teams, and other engineering teams to align technical roadmaps with customer needs.
• Mentorship: Coach and mentor junior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• Operational Excellence: Maintain and operate critical, high-scale services, utilizing observability tools and defining SLOs to ensure superior platform health.

Qualifications

• Distributed Systems Expertise: Strong experience with microservices, messaging systems, databases, and infrastructure as code.
• AI/ML Domain Knowledge: Hands-on experience hosting large language or multimodal models using inference engines like vLLM, SGLang, or Modular.
• Inference Frameworks: Familiarity with distributed inference serving frameworks such as llm-d, NVIDIA Dynamo, or Ray Serve.
• Hardware & Interconnects: Understanding of GPU-level optimization and experience with interconnect technologies like NVlink, XGMI, or RoCE.
• Architecture Proficiency: Knowledge of common LLM architectures and optimization techniques (e.g., continuous batching, quantization).
• Software Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in GoLang or Python and familiarity with gRPC.
• Cloud Operations: Proven experience shipping customer-facing software products and running critical services in a high-scale environment similar to DigitalOcean.
• Open Source Mindset: Experience integrating and building with open-source software.

Requirements

• Compensation Range: $167,200.00 - $209,000
• This is a remote role
• JR: 2026-7591
• #LI-Remote

Benefits

• We innovate with purpose.
• We prioritize career development.
• We care about your well-being.
• We reward our employees.

Company Description

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.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.