Director of Research, Agentic AI

DigitalOcean • Seattle, WA

55d • Hybrid

About The Position

DigitalOcean is building the Agentic Inference Cloud, anchored by Inference Engine, our model-serving platform, to help fast-growing AI-native companies start, scale, and optimize agentic workloads. Applied Research is the layer that generates the proprietary science that compounds across that platform, focusing on areas like adaptive routing, memory improvement, observability, and reinforcement learning. We are hiring a Director of Research to build and lead this function, setting the research agenda, growing the team, and ensuring the science produced translates into real product outcomes such as better model selection and routing, more reliable agents, lower cost and latency, and higher task-success rates for developers and enterprises using agentic workloads on DigitalOcean. This role requires both technical depth to shape research direction and leadership range to build a team, manage a roadmap, and advocate for research investment.

Requirements

• 10+ years in applied ML/AI research or research-adjacent engineering.
• Experience leading a research team or function (formal people management or de facto technical leadership).
• Deep, hands-on expertise in at least two of: LLM routing and model selection, retrieval and memory systems, agent observability and evaluation, or reinforcement learning (RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, GRPO, or related methods).
• A track record of shipping research into production systems.
• Fluency with the current agentic AI landscape: reasoning, planning, tool use, long-horizon memory, and the practical economics of large-scale model serving.
• Strong technical communication skills to defend a research agenda and translate ambiguous research questions into a roadmap with concrete checkpoints.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building or scaling an applied research team inside a product organization.
• Direct experience with inference infrastructure or large-scale model-serving optimization.
• Familiarity with the broader open-weight and open-source model ecosystem.
• PhD in CS, ML, or a related field, or equivalent depth demonstrated through industry impact.
• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in routing, memory, agent evaluation, or reinforcement learning.
• Experience with small, specialized models or domain-tuned LLMs.

Responsibilities

• Set the research agenda and define/own the applied research roadmap across adaptive routing, memory, agent observability, and reinforcement learning.
• Track emerging model architectures and specialized, domain-tuned model approaches, and translate relevant findings into DigitalOcean's product roadmap.
• Ensure the research agenda is tightly coupled to product outcomes, with each research bet mapping to measurable improvements.
• Build and lead the Applied Research team, hiring and mentoring research scientists and engineers.
• Establish the team's operating rhythm for scoping research questions, running experiments, and handing off findings to production teams.
• Represent Applied Research in cross-functional planning cycles and advocate for headcount and investment.
• Partner directly with Inference Engine and other platform/product engineering teams to turn research into shipped capability.
• Turn research prototypes into production-ready capabilities in partnership with engineering.
• Communicate research trade-offs clearly to non-research stakeholders.
• Build DigitalOcean's credibility in the applied agentic-AI research community through publications, talks, open-source contributions, or collaborations.

Benefits

• Competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy.
• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
• Access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses.
• Bonus in addition to base salary.
• Equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director