Senior Director, Applied AI Research

DigitalOcean; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 312,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work arrangement

Equity compensation

Bonus potential

Employee Stock Purchase Program

Job summary

DigitalOcean seeks a senior Applied Research leader to set the agenda and drive production-ready AI capabilities for agentic workloads. You will guide roadmap decisions, recruit and mentor researchers, and ensure research delivers measurable product impact.

Collaborating with Inference Engine and platform teams, you will ship research results into production, explain trade-offs to executives, and advocate for headcount and investment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in applied ML/AI research or research-adjacent engineering with leadership experience
• Track record of shipping research into production systems
• Strong technical communication and ability to defend a research agenda to leadership

Responsibilities

• Define and own the applied research roadmap across adaptive routing, memory, observability, and RL/closed-loop learning
• Grow and mentor the Applied Research team and establish operating rhythms
• Bridge research and product by turning prototypes into production capabilities in partnership with engineering

Skills

Applied ML leadership

Shipping research to production

Technical communication

Model-serving optimization

Education

PhD in CS/ML or equivalent impact

Tools

Inference infrastructure

Open-source model ecosystem

Job description

DigitalOcean seeks a senior Applied Research leader to set the agenda and drive production-ready AI capabilities for agentic workloads. You will guide roadmap decisions, recruit and mentor researchers, and ensure research delivers measurable product impact.

Collaborating with Inference Engine and platform teams, you will ship research results into production, explain trade-offs to executives, and advocate for headcount and investment.