Director of Research, Agentic AI

Digital Ocean
Seattle
Workplace: HybridFull timeUSD 249,600 - 312,000Function: Research & Scientific (R&D)Experience: 10+ yearsSkills: ["Technical communication","Stakeholder management","Research leadership","Roadmap planning","Mentoring"]

Lead Applied Research for DigitalOcean’s Agentic Inference Cloud, defining the research agenda and owning an applied research roadmap across adaptive routing, agent memory, observability, and reinforcement/closed-loop learning. Grow and mentor the Applied Research team, ensure findings ship into production outcomes, and partner with Inference Engine and platform teams to translate prototypes into reliable agent capabilities. Represent the function internally and externally through stakeholder alignment and community contributions.

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FursaFursa
Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean
3 days ago

Director of Research, Agentic AI

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Job Summary

Lead Applied Research for DigitalOcean’s Agentic Inference Cloud, defining the research agenda and owning an applied research roadmap across adaptive routing, agent memory, observability, and reinforcement/closed-loop learning. Grow and mentor the Applied Research team, ensure findings ship into production outcomes, and partner with Inference Engine and platform teams to translate prototypes into reliable agent capabilities. Represent the function internally and externally through stakeholder alignment and community contributions.
Location: Seattle
Workplace: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Research & Scientific (R&D)
Seniority: Director level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Set and own the applied research agenda and roadmap across adaptive routing, memory, agent observability, and reinforcement/closed-loop learning.
  • •Track emerging model architectures and translate relevant advances into DigitalOcean’s product roadmap.
  • •Build and lead the Applied Research team, establishing operating rhythm for scoping, experiment execution/evaluation, and handoffs to production.
  • •Partner with Inference Engine and platform/product engineering teams to turn research prototypes into production-ready capabilities.
  • •Communicate research trade-offs to non-research stakeholders and represent Applied Research externally via publications, talks, or open-source contributions.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 249,600 - 312,000
Perks:Employee AssistanceFlexible TimeLearning BudgetEquity

Key Requirements

  • •10+ years in applied ML/AI research or research-adjacent engineering, including experience leading a research team or function.
  • •Deep, hands-on expertise in at least two areas: LLM routing/model selection, retrieval and memory systems, agent observability/evaluation, or reinforcement learning methods.
  • •Track record of shipping research into production systems, not only publishing or prototyping.
  • •Fluency with the agentic AI landscape including reasoning, planning, tool use, long-horizon memory, and economics of large-scale model serving.
  • •Strong technical communication to defend a research agenda and translate ambiguous research questions into a roadmap with concrete checkpoints.
Experience:10+ yearsApplied AI researchML/AI researchModel serving
Skills:Technical communicationStakeholder managementResearch leadershipRoadmap planningMentoring
Languages:English
Tech Stack:LLM routingModel selectionRetrievalMemory systemsAgent observabilityReinforcement learningRLHFRLAIFDPOPPOGRPOAgent evaluationInference infrastructureLarge-scale model serving

Company Brief

Digital Ocean
Provides cloud infrastructure and developer-focused cloud services including scalable droplets, managed databases, Kubernetes, object storage, and networking to simplify deploying and managing applications for developers and small-to-medium businesses.
Industry: Cloud Computing
Company Size: Enterprise (1,001+ employees)
Revenue: USD 250M to 500M
Growth: Public Company
Valuation: Public Company (Market Cap in USD)
Funding: IPO / Publicly Listed
Headquarters: New York, United States
Founded: 2011
Glassdoor
Glassdoor: 3.8
WebsiteLinkedIn