Senior Engineer II, Inference Engine - Serving Engine
DigitalOcean
| Company | DigitalOcean |
| Category | Engineering |
| Location | San Francisco |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Senior |
| Salary | Not stated by the employer |
| Posted | 17 Mar 2026 |
| Last verified | 30 Jul 2026 |
| Source | Employer career page (greenhouse) |
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 expanding its AI Infrastructure layer to support the next generation of AI-driven applications. We are seeking a Senior Engineer II to join our AI Inference Engine Systems 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.
Mentorship: Coach and mentor junior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
Operational Excellence: Maintain and operate critical, high-scale services, utilizing observability tools and defining SLOs to ensure superior platform health.
What You’ll Bring to DigitalOcean:
Distributed Systems Expertise: Strong experience with microservices, messaging systems, databases, and infrastructure as code.
AI/ML Domain Knowledge: Hands-on experience hosting large language or multimodal models using inference engines like vLLM, SGLang, or Modular.
Inference Frameworks: Familiarity with distributed inference serving frameworks such as llm-d, NVIDIA Dynamo, or Ray Serve.
Hardware & Interconnects: Understanding of GPU-level optimization and experience with interconnect technologies like NVlink, XGMI, or RoCE.
Architecture Proficiency: Knowledge of common LLM architectures and optimization techniques (e.g., continuous batching, quantization).
Software Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in GoLang or Python and familiarity with gRPC.
Cloud Operations: Proven experience shipping customer-facing software products and running critical services in a high-scale environment similar to DigitalOcean.
Open Source Mindset: Experience integrating and building with open-source software.
Compensation Range:
$167,200 - $209,000
*This is a remote role
JR: 2026-7591
#LI-Remote 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 d