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:

• $227,040 - $283,800