Principal Software Engineer (Gradient AI)

<div class="content-intro"><p>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. </p></div><h2><strong>Scope and mission</strong>: </h2> <ul> <li>Drive the design and operation of Gradient AI platform, focusing on delivering a simple and innovative agent development experience with best of breed scale, performance, and predictability. </li> <li>Drive architectural vision, technical excellence, and innovation across both backend systems and customer-facing interactions.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Key Responsibilities:</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Architect and Build</strong></li> <ul> <li>Design and evolve the architecture for our agent development experience including code integration, evaluations, observability, tools, and cross-agent interactions. </li> <li>Drive initiatives to deliver an architecture optimized for scalability, reliability, low-latency, and cost efficiency.</li> <li>Manage and evolve our benchmarking system to continuously raise the bar on our experience.</li> <li>Roll out new services by taking on a hands-on lead role as required to ensure timely delivery. </li> </ul> <li><strong>Technical Leadership</strong></li> <ul> <li>Establish and enforce technical standards, coding practices, tooling, and infrastructure guidelines across the AI/ML engineering teams.</li> <li>Establish best practices for design, testing, deployments, instrumentation, and performance tuning. </li> <li>Mentor other senior engineers, shaping the team’s culture of architectural rigor and operational excellence.</li> </ul> <li><strong>Cross-functional Collaboration</strong></li> <ul> <li>Work with product managers, stakeholders, and business leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable technical roadmaps.</li> <li>Guide customer-facing teams (e.g., consultants, support, sales engineers) to shape AI modernization initiatives via agents. </li> </ul> <li><strong>Reliability, Performance Scaling</strong></li> <ul> <li>Lead Operations Excellence for our Agent development platform, establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while raising the bar. </li> <li>Oversee availability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.</li> <li>Drive AI-driven automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring) to optimize operations</li> </ul> <li><strong>Innovation Future Roadmapping</strong></li> <ul> <li>Drive development of internal tooling leveraging agents across the company, contributing towards increased efficiency and quality across all aspects of engineering. </li> <li>Serve as subject matter expert on new agent development paradigms and lead implementation of mechanisms to productize them.</li> </ul> </ul> <h2><strong>Qualifications:</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Domain Expertise:</strong> Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade AI/ML platforms using the latest GenAI and Agent-development technologies.</li> <li><strong>Technical Experience:</strong> 10+ years in designing and building applications on the cloud with 5+ years experience in AI/ML platforms</li> <li><strong>Leadership Collaboration:</strong> Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact.</li> <li><strong>Operational excellence:</strong> Expertise in driving operational excellence via automation and best practices.</li> <li><strong>Communication Mentoring:</strong> Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring s ... (truncated, view full listing at source)