Principal Infrastructure Architect

Principal Infrastructure Architect

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.

Drive the future of Digital Ocean - design our Compute, GPU, Storage, and Infrastructure Platforms

This role is a Principal Infrastructure Architect on our Hardware Engineering team, this individual owns the forward looking roadmap for our CPU, GPU, Storage, and Infrastructure hardware platforms. Looking forward as the industry evolves, from Air to Liquid to 800

VDC rack scale systems. Collaborating with peers on the Infrastructure and Networking teams who own the roadmaps for datacenters and networking at DO.

• Defining and owning Digital Ocean's hardware architectures for next-generation compute environments across our CPU, GPU, Storage, and Infrastructure Server SKU products, navigating shifts in technology, networking topologies, and AI/ML requirements.
• Serving as Digital Ocean's primary technical stakeholder for infrastructure technologies partnering with SMEs in the Product and Hardware Engineering organization.
• Providing leadership and guidance as a primary stakeholder in the hardware selection and qualification process.
• Evangelizing emerging technical concepts to senior leadership to inform product and business strategies.
• Architecting end-to-end server designs with vendors and partner teams to support a wide variety of CPU, GPU, and other emerging workloads.
• Architecting end-to-end storage topologies with vendor teams to support diverse workloads across performance, capacity, and archival tiers, moving from direct-attached to disaggregated and software-defined storage.
• Leading proof-of-concept (PoC) initiatives for emerging infrastructure technologies and transitioning successful pilots into global deployment standards.
• Mentor engineers at all levels and contribute to a culture of technical excellence, inclusivity, and impact.
• Represent Digital Ocean in the broader community attending conferences, contributing to papers and presentations.

• 10+ years of experience in server architecture, storage architecture, infrastructure engineering, or a related field, with a track record of owning and deploying designs at scale.
• Deep expertise in server and storage hardware platforms with strong working knowledge of compute technologies across the spectrum—from commodity CPU servers to rack scale GPU and xPU platforms.
• Working experience of driving AI/ML hardware roadmaps and the ability to translate evolving silicon, accelerator, memory, and storage trends into future-proofed platform designs.
• Knowledge of emerging and non-traditional hardware approaches such as CXL memory pooling, DPUs/SmartNICs, disaggregated storage, and computational storage.
• Demonstrated ability to lead proof-of-concept initiatives and scale successful pilots into global deployment standards.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, partnering with technical and business teams along with external vendors and partners.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, including mentoring engineers and representing the company externally at conferences and through technical papers.

• $184,000 - $231,000

* This is a hybrid 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 prioritize career development. At DO, you'll do the best work of your career. You will work with…