Senior Engineer: Inference Data Plane

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. What You’ll Do: 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. What You’ll Bring to DigitalOcean: 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. Compensation Range: $139,200.00 - $174,000.00 *This is a remote role JR: 2026-7623 #LI-Remote Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean 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 ... (truncated, view full listing at source)