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.
We are seeking a player-coach Engineering Director to lead the team that implements and contributes to the design and optimization of our Serverless Inference infrastructure and APIs. In this role, you will tackle the challenges of large-scale AI workloads, focusing on throughput, GPU utilization, and fault tolerance to support next-generation inference needs of AI native enterprises.
What You'll Do:- Engineering Excellence: Raise the engineering bar through strong software design, operational discipline, incident management, and continuous improvement practices.
- Culture: Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous learning across the team.
- Team Leadership & Development: Recruit, mentor, and coach engineers on the team, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
- Execution & Delivery: Partner closely with platform, GPU infrastructure, and product engineering teams to deliver production-grade systems and highly available APIs.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Product Management, other engineering teams, and key stakeholders to align priorities, manage dependencies, and communicate progress and risks.
- Operational Health: Lead by example in incident response, operational readiness, and production-quality engineering practices.
- Strategic Architecture & Planning: Define the technical roadmap and oversee the architecture of high-throughput API gateway for inference engine.
What You'll Add to DigitalOcean
- 4+ years of experience directly managing engineering teams.
- Experience managing teams that build and operate multi-tenant platforms or distributed backend systems.
- Deep understanding of SRE principles, including observability, incident management, reliability engineering, capacity planning, and operational automation.
- Strong understanding of cloud-native multi region architectures, microservices, and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Experience with Kubernetes and/or operating high-scale distributed services in production environments.
Bonus
- Experience working with GPUs, GPU utilization tracking, or accelerated computing infrastructure.
- Familiarity with Large Language Models (LLMs) and modern LLM serving architectures, including engines like vLLM or Triton.
- Familiarity with LLM serving stacks such as TensorRT-LLM or similar technologies.
- Experience building Agents yourself for either personal or professional use.
- Experience with API gateways, traffic routing, or service mesh technologies.
*This job is located in Bengaluru, India
#LI-Hybrid
- 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.
Skills Required
- 4+ years of experience directly managing engineering teams.
- Experience managing teams that build and operate multi-tenant platforms or distributed backend systems.
- Deep understanding of SRE principles including observability, incident management, reliability engineering, capacity planning, and operational automation.
- Strong understanding of cloud-native multi-region architectures, microservices, and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Experience with Kubernetes and/or operating high-scale distributed services in production environments.
- Experience working with GPUs, GPU utilization tracking, or accelerated computing infrastructure.
- Familiarity with Large Language Models (LLMs) and modern LLM serving architectures, including vLLM or Triton.
- Familiarity with LLM serving stacks such as TensorRT-LLM or similar technologies.
- Experience building Agents for personal or professional use.
- Experience with API gateways, traffic routing, or service mesh technologies.
DigitalOcean Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage includes medical, dental, vision, and mental-health support plus employer-paid life/AD&D/disability, with multiple plan options and above-average employer contributions. Offerings are described as market-leading and in some cases fully paid to keep premiums low.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity awards (new-hire and performance RSUs) are paired with an Employee Stock Purchase Plan offered at a discount. This ownership component augments cash compensation and broadens participation in company growth.
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Parental & Family Support — Paid parental leave is provided for a defined period and includes a structured, part-time transition-back program. The approach emphasizes a smoother return-to-work experience for new parents.
DigitalOcean Insights
What We Do
DigitalOcean is the Inference Cloud — a full-stack, production-ready cloud platform built to run AI applications with predictable performance, sustainable economics, and radically simpler operations at scale. We are built for teams turning AI into real products — not just training models. Our advantage is not fewer features, but fewer failure modes when operating AI at scale — combining minimal operational overhead, predictable cost efficiency, and a full-stack cloud that works as a system. Hyperscalers are broad by design. Neoclouds are infrastructure-first. DigitalOcean is inference-first — with a real cloud underneath. It combines inference-optimized compute, managed inference software, and integrated cloud capabilities that reduce operational burden for teams running real workloads. Inference is the foundation—not the boundary. Everything else builds on top of it.
Why Work With Us
At DO, we do career-defining work. We innovate with AI and build cutting-edge tech. Our rewards to match that intensity - to motivate you, recognize your impact, and give you what you need to thrive. If you have a growth mindset, like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment, you'll find your place here.
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DigitalOcean Offices
Remote Workspace
Employees work remotely.
We commit to both remote work and in-person collaboration. These ways of working are dependent on specific roles and are mutually agreed upon by employees. In the US, we are mainly remote. In our APAC locations, we have a hybrid in-office approach.
