Manager, AI Engineering - AI & Business Tech Engineering

DigitalOcean • Boston, MA

3d • Remote

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Manager, AI Engineering to lead a new team within the AI & Business Technology Engineering organization. This role is a player-coach position responsible for setting the technical direction, contributing to architecture and prototypes, and shaping AI engineering practices. The manager will hire, coach, and grow a distributed team to deliver AI-native capabilities that transform how DigitalOcean's various departments operate. The company is undergoing a company-wide transformation to operate as an AI-native business, and this role will be instrumental in defining that transformation internally. The work involves building internal AI copilots and agents for non-engineering teams, evolving the internal AI platform and tooling, and re-architecting business processes across enterprise systems to be AI-native.

Requirements

• Significant experience as a software engineering manager, with a strong track record of leading and growing engineering teams that ship reliably in production.
• Hands-on engineering depth in modern AI/ML systems: large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agents and tool use, evaluation, and the operational discipline of LLMOps (prompt versioning, regression testing, cost attribution, observability for non-deterministic outputs).
• Practical experience building or operating agentic systems—orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or equivalents), Model Context Protocol (MCP) tooling, vector stores, and runtime guardrails.
• Experience designing internal developer platforms or productivity tooling that engineers actually choose to adopt, including golden paths, self-service APIs, and SDKs.
• A clear point of view on AI governance and safety: audit logging, capability boundaries, minimum-privilege tool access, human-in-the-loop escalation, and alignment with frameworks like the NIST AI RMF.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in at least one production language (Python, Go, TypeScript, or Java) and modern cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, serverless, gRPC, observability stacks).
• A bias for shipping: integrating customer and stakeholder feedback into how the team works, focusing on outcomes over outputs, and unblocking the team with pragmatic decisions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to influence non-engineering stakeholders and translate ambiguous business problems into well-scoped AI systems.
• Experience hiring and retaining strong AI engineering talent in competitive markets, and growing junior engineers into senior contributors.
• Comfort working in a hybrid environment—able to partner closely with our Boston/Cambridge community while leading distributed teammates across the US and beyond.

Nice To Haves

• Experience re-engineering business processes in enterprise systems (Workday, Salesforce, NetSuite, Greenhouse, or similar), or working closely with finance, people, GTM, or support functions on AI deployments.
• Prior experience deploying AI tooling at scale to internal users (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent enterprise rollouts).

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of AI engineers (starting from an established nucleus, scaling to a high-performing group of 6–8) building copilots, agents, and the internal AI platform that powers them.
• Act as a player-coach: review architecture, contribute to design and prototypes for critical agents and platform components, write code where the team’s leverage demands it, and set a high technical bar.
• Shape and execute the technical roadmap for the AI Engineering team in partnership with the Senior Director, AI & Business Technology Engineering—across internal AI copilots for teams, the AI platform and developer experience that supports them, and AI-native business process re-engineering across DigitalOcean.
• Design and deliver agentic systems end to end: orchestration, tool use, capability boundaries, memory and state, evaluation, observability, runtime governance, and incident response for non-deterministic systems.
• Build and evolve our internal AI platform—including the MCP gateway, agent runtimes, model access and routing, evaluation harnesses, and self-service developer experience—so every DO engineer and business team has a paved path to building with AI safely.
• Partner with leaders from Finance & Supply Chain Systems, People Systems, Sales & Marketing Systems, Collaboration & Security Systems and their non-engineering business owners to identify the highest-leverage AI opportunities and ship them.
• Collaborate closely with peer leaders in Enterprise Architecture, Data Engineering, Program Management, and Security to ensure our AI systems are well-architected, governed, observable, and trusted.
• Champion modern AI engineering practices: evaluation-first development, prompt and agent versioning, runtime guardrails, audit logging, human-in-the-loop escalation, and cost attribution for LLM workloads.
• Develop OKRs for the team, instrument the right business and engineering metrics, and clearly report progress to leadership and the broader organization.
• Recruit world-class AI engineering talent in Boston, Cambridge, and broader US & non-US hubs; coach and develop the team you build; create an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers.
• Contribute to AI & Business Technology Engineering leadership team planning and goal-setting, represent the AI Engineering team’s perspective in cross-org forums, and contribute back to internal communities of practice (agent-skills, Claude pilot, AI workflows).

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: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed