Staff AI/ML Forward-Deployed Engineer, Production Lead

digitalocean98; United States; Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 239,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Equity

Hybrid work model

Job summary

digitalocean98 seeks a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to act as the technical lead for AI-native customers and platform initiatives. You will bridge product engineering, AI infrastructure, and customer implementations to help strategic clients deploy and scale production AI and agentic systems.

This hybrid role emphasizes architectural design, benchmarking, and collaboration with GPU vendors and model providers.

Qualifications

• Experience in Forward Deployed Engineering or AI platform engineering for production AI systems.
• Strong knowledge of workflow orchestration, deployment systems, and scalable AI architectures.
• Production coding in Python or Go; building tooling, automation, and benchmarking.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deploy production AI and agentic systems for strategic clients.
• Benchmark and optimize AI infrastructure for latency, GPUs, and cost.
• Surface insights to product and research teams as first customer for new capabilities.
• Create scalable deployment assets and reference architectures.
• Collaborate with GPUs, model providers, and ISVs on co-development and launch readiness.
• Travel up to 30% for client engagements and events.

Skills

Forward Deployed

AI Infrastructure

Technical Consulting

Python

Go

Benchmarking

Tools

Automation Tools

Job description

digitalocean98 seeks a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to act as the technical lead for AI-native customers and platform initiatives. You will bridge product engineering, AI infrastructure, and customer implementations to help strategic clients deploy and scale production AI and agentic systems.

This hybrid role emphasizes architectural design, benchmarking, and collaboration with GPU vendors and model providers.