Senior AI Inference Data Plane Engineer

DigitalOcean; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 139,000 - 174,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Hybrid work model

Job summary

DigitalOcean seeks a Senior Engineer 2 for the AI Inference Data Plane team. You will design, develop, and deliver high‑scale data plane services powering Inference as a Service, working at the intersection of distributed systems and AI hardware.

You will lead critical components, optimize performance, and collaborate with product and other teams to ensure reliability and scalability of the inference stack.

Qualifications

• Hands‑on experience hosting large language or multimodal models using inference engines.
• Experience with distributed inference serving frameworks and cloud platforms.
• Deep knowledge of LLM architectures, optimization techniques, and continual batching.
• Proficiency in GoLang or Python and familiarity with gRPC.
• Open source contributions and experience integrating with OSS projects.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership driving end‑to‑end design of data plane components.
• Architect scalable, multi‑tenant AI inference cloud systems with high availability.
• Optimize distributed inference hosting with tensor parallelism and KV cache tuning.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally to align roadmaps with customer needs.
• Mentor engineers and uphold operational excellence with SLOs and observability.

Job description

DigitalOcean seeks a Senior Engineer 2 for the AI Inference Data Plane team. You will design, develop, and deliver high‑scale data plane services powering Inference as a Service, working at the intersection of distributed systems and AI hardware.

You will lead critical components, optimize performance, and collaborate with product and other teams to ensure reliability and scalability of the inference stack.