Director of Research, Agentic AI

Socket.dev; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 312,000; Full time

Job summary

DigitalOcean is hiring a Director of Research to set the applied ML/AI research agenda, grow the team, and ensure science translates to tangible product outcomes for agentic workloads. You will lead across routing, memory, observability, and RL, balancing hands-on evaluation with strategic leadership.

This hybrid role requires coordinating with Inference Engine and other platform teams to turn prototypes into production capabilities, and communicating trade-offs to executives.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in applied ML/AI research or research-adjacent engineering, including leadership of a research team.

Responsibilities

• Define the applied research roadmap across routing, memory, observability, and RL.
• Track emerging model architectures and map relevant ones to product plans.
• Align research bets with measurable gains in model selection, reliability, or latency.
• Grow and mentor the Applied Research team and set the operating rhythm.
• Collaborate with engineering and product to turn research into shipped capabilities.

Skills

Applied ML/AI leadership

Model routing & selection

Retrieval & memory systems

Agent observability & evaluation

Reinforcement learning (RLHF/RLAIF)

Technical communication

Job description

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 building the Agentic Inference Cloud — anchored by Inference Engine, our model-serving platform — to help fast-growing AI-native companies start, scale, and optimize agentic workloads. Applied Research is the layer that generates the proprietary science that compounds across that platform: routing that learns instead of following static rules, memory that improves recall and personalization, observability that explains why agents succeed or get stuck, and reinforcement learning that closes the loop between production signals and model behavior.

We’re hiring a Director of Research to build and lead this function: set the research agenda, grow the team, and make sure the science this group produces ships into real product outcomes — better model selection and routing, more reliable agents, lower cost and latency, and higher task-success rates for the developers and enterprises running agentic workloads on DigitalOcean.

This is a hybrid role by design: enough technical depth to personally evaluate and shape research direction across routing, memory, observability, and RL, and enough leadership range to build a team, prioritize against a roadmap, and defend research investment to product and executive stakeholders.

What You’ll Do

Set the research agenda

• Define and own the applied research roadmap across adaptive routing (evolving model selection from static rules into a system that learns from real usage, cost, and latency), memory (retrieval quality and durable recall for long-running agents), agent observability (understanding when agents make progress, get stuck, or make mistakes), and reinforcement learning / closed-loop learning (turning production feedback into better models and policies).
• Track emerging model architectures and specialized, domain-tuned model approaches, and translate what's relevant into DigitalOcean’s product roadmap.
• Keep the agenda tightly coupled to product outcomes — every research bet should map to a measurable improvement in model selection, agent reliability, cost/latency, or task-success rate, not research for its own sake.

Build and lead the team

• Grow the Applied Research team, hiring and mentoring research scientists and engineers.
• Establish the team's operating rhythm: how research questions get scoped, how experiments get run and evaluated, and how findings hand off to production teams.
• Represent Applied Research in cross-functional planning cycles alongside other engineering and product leaders, and make the case for headcount and investment on its own merits.

Bridge research and product

• Partner directly with Inference Engine and the other platform and product engineering teams that own agent runtime and evaluation infrastructure to turn research into shipped capability.
• Turn research prototypes into production-ready capabilities in partnership with engineering — shipping research, not just publishing it.
• Communicate research trade-offs clearly to non-research stakeholders, including when a promising direction isn't ready for product investment yet.

Represent DigitalOcean externally

• Build DigitalOcean's credibility in the applied agentic-AI research community through publications, talks, open-source contributions, or collaborations — where they serve product and hiring goals.

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean

• 10+ years in applied ML/AI research or research-adjacent engineering, including experience leading a research team or function — formal people management or clear de facto technical leadership of a research group.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in at least two of: LLM routing and model selection, retrieval and memory systems, agent observability and evaluation, or reinforcement learning (RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, GRPO, or related methods).
• A track record of shipping research into production systems — not just publishing or prototyping it.
• Fluency with the current agentic AI landscape: reasoning, planning, tool use, long-horizon memory, and the practical economics of large-scale model serving.
• Strong technical communication — able to defend a research agenda to engineering leaders, product leaders, and executives, and to translate ambiguous research questions into a roadmap with concrete checkpoints.

Preferred Qualifications

Strong signal

• Experience building or scaling an applied research team inside a product organization (not a pure research lab), with research investment justified in business terms.
• Direct experience with inference infrastructure or large-scale model-serving optimization.
• Familiarity with the broader open-weight and open-source model ecosystem.

Nice to have

• PhD in CS, ML, or a related field — or equivalent depth demonstrated through industry impact.
• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in routing, memory, agent evaluation, or reinforcement learning.
• Experience with small, specialized models or domain-tuned LLMs.

Compensation Range:

• $249,600 - $312,000

*This is a hybrid role

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

• We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful 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 are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education. All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
• We care about your well-being. Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
• 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 based on company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our 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.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.