Principal Software Engineer (Gradient AI)

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.

Scope and mission:

• 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.
• Drive architectural vision, technical excellence, and innovation across both backend systems and customer-facing interactions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and Build
• Design and evolve the architecture for our agent development experience including code integration, evaluations, observability, tools, and cross-agent interactions.
• Drive initiatives to deliver an architecture optimized for scalability, reliability, low-latency, and cost efficiency.
• Manage and evolve our benchmarking system to continuously raise the bar on our experience.
• Roll out new services by taking on a hands-on lead role as required to ensure timely delivery.
• Technical Leadership
• Establish and enforce technical standards, coding practices, tooling, and infrastructure guidelines across the AI/ML engineering teams.
• Establish best practices for design, testing, deployments, instrumentation, and performance tuning.
• Mentor other senior engineers, shaping the team's culture of architectural rigor and operational excellence.
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Work with product managers, stakeholders, and business leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable technical roadmaps.
• Guide customer-facing teams (e.g., consultants, support, sales engineers) to shape AI modernization initiatives via agents.
• Reliability, Performance & Scaling
• Lead Operations Excellence for our Agent development platform, establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while raising the bar.
• Oversee availability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.
• Drive AI-driven automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring) to optimize operations
• Innovation & Future Roadmapping
• Drive development of internal tooling leveraging agents across the company, contributing towards increased efficiency and quality across all aspects of engineering.
• Serve as subject matter expert on new agent development paradigms and lead implementation of mechanisms to productize them.

Qualifications:

• Domain Expertise: Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade AI/ML platforms using the latest GenAI and Agent-development technologies.
• Technical Experience: 10+ years in designing and building applications on the cloud with 5+ years experience in AI/ML platforms
• Leadership & Collaboration: Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact.
• Operational excellence: Expertise in driving operational excellence via automation and best practices.
• Communication & Mentoring: Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring senior and junior engineers; translating complex concepts across engineering and business teams.

Compensation Range:

• $272,448 - $340,560

*This is a remote role

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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, 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 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.
• DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.