Senior Engineer: Inference Data Plane

DigitalOcean•San Francisco, CA

7d•Remote

About The Position

Dive in and do the best work of your career at DigitalOcean. Journey alongside a strong community of top talent who are relentless in their drive to build the simplest scalable cloud. If you have a growth mindset, naturally like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment of a true industry disruptor, you’ll find your place here. We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world. DigitalOcean is expanding its AI Infrastructure layer to support the next generation of AI-driven applications. We are seeking a Senior Engineer 2 to play a key role in our AI Infrastructure Control Plane team. This team's mission is to orchestrate and operate compute fleet, storage and networking for running AI workloads - inference, training, fine-tuning - at scale. In this high-impact role, you will be a primary technical architect and leader, responsible for building the foundational control plane services that power our large Gen AI model hosting infrastructure. 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. You will bridge the gap between high-scale distributed systems and specialized AI inference orchestration to ensure our global platform remains simple, reliable, and accessible for developers building the next generation of AI applications.

Requirements

Distributed Systems Mastery: Deep experience with distributed and cloud services, including messaging systems, databases, and infrastructure as code, observability, and security.
Cloud Infrastructure Expertise: Advanced knowledge of cloud networking (VPCs, Load Balancers), containerization (Kubernetes), and cloud storage (block, object, NFS). Deep networking software experience (VLAN, RDMA, Ethernet, L3-L7 network protocols, etc) would be a plus.
AI/ML Domain Knowledge: Proven experience building AI/ML products, specifically focusing on Gen AI platforms, LLM hosting, and inference workflows.
Operational Track Record: Significant experience running customer-facing, high-availability services across multiple regions.
Open Source Engagement: Experience integrating and building with open-source software and a bias for technical ownership.
Software Engineering: Expert proficiency in GoLang or Python and familiarity with gRPC for service-to-service communication.

Responsibilities

Architectural Leadership: Drive the design and development of distributed services within our AI Infrastructure ecosystem, including complex orchestration for LLM inference and hosting services. Your focus will be the control plane orchestration of compute, networking, and storage for AI workloads.
System Design: Create, refine, and assess system design proposals for our high-scale, multi-tenant inference cloud ecosystem, ensuring they meet rigorous standards for availability and resiliency.
Operational Excellence: Lead the operational strategy for critical services, defining SLOs and leveraging advanced observability to maintain platform health in a high-scale environment.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner deeply with Product Management, TPMs, and Engineering Management peers to align technical roadmaps with business priorities.
Strategic Growth: Work on new architecture initiatives that enable fleet optimization and help evolve DigitalOcean into a market leader for AI-native networking and infrastructure.

Benefits

We prioritize career development.
At DO, you’ll do the best work of your career.
You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry.
We are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big.
Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing.
We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
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.
While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
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.