Senior Engineer AI Inference Engine Systems

Dive in and do the best work of your career rney 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.

Digital Ocean 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 Data Plane 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 optimise distributed inference hosting using techniques like tensor/data parallelism, KV cache optimisations, 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, utilising observability tools and defining SLOs to ensure superior platform health.

• 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 optimisation and experience with interconnect technologies like NVlink, XGMI, or RoCE.
• Architecture Proficiency:
  Knowledge of common LLM architectures and optimisation techniques (e.g., continuous batching, quantisation).
• 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 Digital Ocean.
• Open Source Mindset:
  Experience integrating and building with open‑source software.

• $ - $209,000
• This is a remote role

• We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting‑edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful sense of responsibility for customers, products, employees, and decisions.
• We prioritise 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 organisational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant…