Principal Software Engineer (Gradient AI)

Seattle 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. 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 $227,040 - $283,800 Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting‑edge technology company on an upward trajectory, simplifying cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will think big, bold, and scrappy, with a bias for action and a strong 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 provide resources for growth, including reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, and access to LinkedIn Learning’s 10,000+ courses. We care about your well‑being. Regardless of location, we provide a competitive benefits package, including Employee Assistance Program, local meetups, flexible time off policy, and more. 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 by company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation, including equity grants upon hire and participation in the 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. #J-18808-Ljbffr