Staff AI Architect

Role Description

We are looking for an Architect who will own the technical shape of how DigitalOcean operates as an AI-native business — the agentic systems our teams build, and the enterprise architecture they plug into.

DigitalOcean is building the substrate for an AI-native company, and this role owns its architecture. The ambition: any team—Finance, People, Sales, Marketing, Support, IT, Engineering—can put a governed agent into a real business workflow in hours or days, on rails that make the safe path the fast path.

Your influence spans all of Business Technology, not just AI Engineering. This is not an advisory role or a review-board seat. You will write code, build prototypes, publish reference implementations, and pair with engineers on the hard parts.

What You'll Do

• Own the AI reference architecture.
• Define the patterns and standards for how DigitalOcean builds agentic systems.
• Build alongside the team: design, prototype, and code the hardest components.
• Architect the internal AI platform: shape shared services every agent depends on.
• Design the tool and capability layer: define how agents discover and invoke capabilities.
• Design how agents meet enterprise systems: establish integration, identity, and authorization patterns.
• Re-architect business processes to be AI-native: partner with functional leaders to find opportunities.
• Set the standard for governance and safety: design capability boundaries and audit trails.
• Own the unit economics: design for cost per completed task.
• Make architectural decisions legible and durable: write RFCs and ADRs.
• Multiply the team: mentor engineers and set the technical bar through architecture reviews.
• Partner across the company: serve as the architectural counterpart to various teams.

What Success Looks Like

• An architecture the whole team builds on, with durable interfaces.
• Provisioning a new agent is a single declarative step.
• Golden paths and reference implementations teams choose over hand-rolling their own.
• Agent behavior you can vouch for in production.
• Unit economics under architectural control.
• Business outcomes on re-architected workflows.

Qualifications

• Substantial experience as a software, solution, or enterprise architect (typically 10+ years).
• Recent experience building LLM and agentic systems that ran in production.
• Depth in at least one production language (Python, Go, TypeScript, or Java).
• Experience architecting on and integrating Workday, Salesforce, NetSuite, etc.
• API and event-driven design experience.
• A clear position on securing autonomous systems.
• Capability boundaries and data governance fluency.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Effective across time zones and comfortable in a hybrid environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience deploying AI developer tooling at scale.
• Experience re-engineering finance, people, GTM, or support processes.
• Familiarity with emerging agent interoperability and identity work.
• Agent evaluation and observability tooling experience.
• Knowledge graphs or ontology modeling applied to enterprise retrieval.
• Enterprise architecture practice experience.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Compensation Range

$191,200- $239,000

*This is a remote role

JR: 2026-8013

#LI-Remote

Benefits

• Competitive array of benefits including Employee Assistance Program.
• Flexible time off policy.
• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
• Access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses.
• Equity compensation to eligible employees.

Company Description

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.