Senior Engineer, Inference Data Plane

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. DigitalOcean is expanding its AI Infrastructure layer to support the next generation of AI-driven applications. We are seeking a Senior Engineer 2 to join our AI Inference Data Plane team. In this role, you will be a key technical leader responsible for designing, developing, and delivering high-scale, resilient data plane services that power our "Inference as a Service" offering. You will work at the intersection of distributed systems and specialized AI hardware to ensure our customers can deploy and scale their models with industry-leading performance and reliability. This is a hands-on role, requiring you to be able to develop high quality software while availing of all the productivity boosts granted by the latest AI coding agents. What You’ll Do: Technical Leadership: Act as a technical leader on the team, driving the end-to-end design, development, and delivery of critical data plane components hosting large generative AI models. System Design: Architect and refine system design proposals for our high-scale, multi-tenant AI inference cloud ecosystem, ensuring they meet rigorous availability and resiliency standards. Performance Optimization: Implement and optimize distributed inference hosting using techniques like tensor/data parallelism, KV cache optimizations, and smart routing. Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with Product Managers, customer-facing teams, and other engineering teams to align technical roadmaps with customer needs. Distributed Serving at Scale: Build on