Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, AI/ML

Role Description

We are looking for a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) who is passionate about operationalizing production AI-native and agentic workloads at scale. This is a high-impact role designed to serve as the “technical tip of the spear” for DigitalOcean’s most strategic AI-native customers and platform initiatives.

As an FDE, you will operate at the intersection of Product Engineering, AI Infrastructure, and Customer Implementation. You will partner deeply with strategic AI-native enterprises (ANEs), startups, infrastructure vendors, and internal engineering teams to deploy, optimize, and scale production AI systems on DigitalOcean’s AI-Native Cloud.

Your mission is to accelerate production adoption of AI-native systems while helping shape the future of DigitalOcean’s AI-Native Cloud for the inference and agentic era.

What You’ll Do

• Strategic AI Workload Operationalization: Partner with strategic ANEs and AI startups to architect, deploy, optimize, and scale production AI and agentic systems on DigitalOcean’s AI-Native Cloud.
• AI Performance & Systems Engineering: Optimize distributed inference and runtime performance through benchmarking, GPU efficiency tuning, KV-cache optimization, speculative decoding, prefill/decode disaggregation, multi-node deployments, and latency/cost optimization.
• Platform Validation & Product Acceleration: Act as the “first customer” for DigitalOcean’s AI-native platform capabilities. Surface real-world operational insights, architectural gaps, and scaling bottlenecks directly to Product Engineering and Research teams.
• Platform Intelligence & Automation: Build scalable deployment assets including benchmarking systems, automation tooling, AI starter kits, deployment frameworks, operational playbooks, finetuning workflows, and reference architectures.
• Ecosystem & Technical Enablement: Collaborate with GPU vendors, model providers, infrastructure partners, and ISVs on co-development, technical validation, optimization, and launch readiness.
• Travel: Ability to travel up to 30% for customer engagements, strategic onsite workshops, ecosystem partnerships, conferences, and internal collaboration.

Key Metrics

• Customer Adoption & Production Success: Measured by high-impact production workloads launched, reduction in time-to-production, pilot-to-production conversion rates, and expansion of AI-native platform adoption across strategic customers.
• Platform Intelligence & Product Influence: Measured by product improvements, roadmap influence, validated customer hypotheses, and operational insights generated from real-world production deployments.
• Asset & Tooling Delivery: Measured through adoption of FDE-built frameworks, automation tooling, benchmarking systems, operational playbooks, and reference architectures across customers and internal teams.
• Field Enablement & Ecosystem Scale: Measured through successful enablement of customer-facing teams, ecosystem collaboration outcomes, and adoption of FDE deployment standards across the AI-native ecosystem.

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean

• AI-Native Systems & Architecture Expertise: Experience designing and operationalizing production AI systems including inference workloads, agentic runtimes, orchestration frameworks, and AI-native applications.
• Distributed Systems & Infrastructure Mastery: Deep expertise with NVIDIA and AMD GPU platforms and their software ecosystems.
• Runtime & Orchestration Systems: Experience with AI orchestration and agent frameworks.
• Software Engineering & Automation: Strong production coding skills in Python or Go.
• Performance & Operational Intelligence: Proven ability to benchmark and optimize AI infrastructure.
• Consultative & Cross-Functional Execution: Ability to establish technical credibility with CTOs, Principal architects, and ecosystem partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• AI Infrastructure & Forward Deployed Engineering Experience.
• Platform Enablement & Ecosystem Experience.
• Open Source & AI Ecosystem Involvement.
• Vendor & Strategic Partnership Collaboration.

Compensation Range

$220,000 - $239,000

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

• We innovate with purpose.
• We prioritize career development.
• We care about your well-being.
• We reward our employees.

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.

You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period.