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.
Our Inference Engine organization is seeking an experienced Senior Director of Engineering to lead a high-performing engineering team building and scaling our Large Language Model (LLM) inference products across the control plane, model optimization, and model architecture layers. This organization sits at the heart of DigitalOcean's mission to bring our signature simplicity to optimized LLM inference.
In this role, you will own DigitalOcean's inference product suite — Serverless Inference, Dedicated Inference, Inference Router, Batch Inference, and Multimodal Inference — along with the model optimization and architecture stack that underpins them. You'll be responsible for delivering robust, cost-efficient systems that serve millions of users globally at scale and high performance.
What You'll Do:- Team Leadership & Development: Recruit, mentor, and coach engineers on the team, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
- Build Performant and Scalable Inference Products: Work with Product teams to define and execute on the Product roadmap for all of DigitalOcean’s Inference Products - including Serverless Inference, Dedicated Inference, Inference Router, Batch Inference and Multimodal Inference
- Inference Optimizations and Model Architecture: Lead the design and evolution of our inference serving stack, driving deep technical strategy across vLLM, SGLang, and LLM-D to optimize throughput, latency, and GPU utilization at scale. Architect the model-serving and optimization layer — spanning quantization, KV-cache management, speculative decoding, and disaggregated serving — to deliver best-in-class performance-per-dollar across our LLM inference products.
- 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: Ensure the production health, stability, and on-call rotation of all to maintain the customer SLAs.
- Champion Best Practices: Institutionalize benchmarking frameworks, observability, and auto-tuning capabilities to guide system and infrastructure tuning efforts. Encourage contributions to open-source inference engines to advance our capabilities.
- Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 6+ years in a technical leadership or management role, ideally within Inference Systems or AI/ML systems.
- Technical Depth: Deep expertise in distributed systems design, modern AI/ML technologies, Kubernetes at scale, and LLM inference, and AI workload orchestration, scheduling, and resource management. Ability to engage in deep technical discussions with your team regarding highly scalable control plane design, inference engines (vLLM, SGLang), and model architectures. Strong understanding of cloud-native multi region architectures, microservices, and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Hardware-Aware Optimization: Strategic knowledge of GPU architectures (NVIDIA and/or AMD), interconnects (like NVLink), and hardware topology and their direct impact on AI training and inference performance.
- Systems Engineering & Security: Familiarity with concepts in container runtime internals, system isolation, and security contexts to manage risk in shared infrastructure.
- Observability and SLOs: Expertise in defining, tracking, and operationalizing deep infrastructure and inference metrics (e.g., TTFT, TPOT) to drive performance improvements and meet service level objectives.
- Product Mindset: Demonstrated ability to translate complex technical requirements into user-focused product features. Understanding of the balance between innovation and reliability.
- Communication: Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders and align diverse teams around a shared vision.
- Ownership: A strong sense of ownership and a proactive drive to identify and resolve issues preventing your team from delivering value.
- $274,400 - $343,000
*This is a Hybrid role
JR: 2026-8090
#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
- 10+ years software engineering experience with 6+ years in technical leadership or management
- Experience in inference systems or AI/ML systems
- Deep expertise in distributed systems design, cloud-native multi-region architectures, and microservices
- Kubernetes at scale
- Experience with LLM inference and inference engines (vLLM, SGLang, LLM-D)
- Hardware-aware optimization knowledge of GPU architectures (NVIDIA and/or AMD), interconnects like NVLink, and hardware topology
- Familiarity with container runtime internals, system isolation, and security contexts
- Expertise in observability, defining/tracking SLOs and inference metrics (e.g., TTFT, TPOT)
- Proven experience recruiting, mentoring, and coaching engineering teams
- Product mindset and ability to translate technical requirements into user-focused product features
- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
- Experience with benchmarking frameworks, auto-tuning, and contributing to open-source inference engines
DigitalOcean Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is described as market‑leading across medical, dental, vision, and mental‑health, with company‑paid life and income‑protection. This positions core healthcare and protection benefits as a standout element of the package.
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Parental & Family Support — Parental leave is characterized as above‑average, frequently highlighted alongside a phased return‑to‑work program. This indicates strong support for new parents beyond baseline policies.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — The package includes recurring equity grants and access to an Employee Stock Purchase Plan. This provides meaningful ownership opportunities alongside cash compensation.
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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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.
