Staff Software Engineer: AI Inference Data Plane

Digital Ocean
Seattle
Workplace: RemoteFull timeFunction: Solutions Engineering & Sales EngineeringExperience: 5+ yearsSkills: ["Leadership","Mentorship","Collaboration","Communication","Problem-solving"]

Senior engineer role focused on optimizing AI inference performance for DigitalOcean’s Gen AI workload. Leads architecture and benchmarking across inference engines and GPU kernels, tackles memory bandwidth bottlenecks, guides hardware-software integration, and mentors peers to elevate the team’s technical bar in high-performance GPU infrastructure.

Loading

Loading job details...

Preparing the role view and application actions.

FursaFursa
Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean
4 months ago

Staff Software Engineer: AI Inference Data Plane

✓ Verified Job

Canonical indexed version, validated from employer's careers page.

Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 6 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Senior engineer role focused on optimizing AI inference performance for DigitalOcean’s Gen AI workload. Leads architecture and benchmarking across inference engines and GPU kernels, tackles memory bandwidth bottlenecks, guides hardware-software integration, and mentors peers to elevate the team’s technical bar in high-performance GPU infrastructure.
Location: Seattle
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Solutions Engineering & Sales Engineering

Key Responsibilities

  • •Lead the technical strategy for benchmarking and performance optimizations at the inference engine and GPU kernel layers, ensuring infrastructure extracts maximum value from every TFLOP.
  • •Engineer solutions for complex performance issues, including attention layer optimizations, memory and precision management, and distributed multi-node GPU parallelization.
  • •Act as a subject matter expert on modern GPU families and software stacks, advising on hardware procurement and software integration.
  • •Mentor team members through code/design reviews to raise technical standards without adding administrative burden.
  • •Collaborate with Product Management and TPMs to translate hardware limits into shippable product features, enabling a powerful and developer-friendly platform.

Key Requirements

  • •5+ years of experience in high-performance computing or AI infrastructure, with a proven track record of solving compute utilization and memory bandwidth bottlenecks.
  • •Gen AI literacy with deep familiarity of the Gen AI landscape (LLM, VLM, LMM) and major model families.
  • •Hands-on experience with attention-layer optimizations and parallelization across distributed GPU environments.
  • •Comprehensive understanding of NVIDIA and AMD GPU architectures and their software ecosystems (CUDA, ROCm, etc.).
  • •Extensive experience integrating, building with, and contributing to open-source software projects.
Experience:5+ yearsHigh-performance computingAI infrastructureGen AIGPU
Skills:LeadershipMentorshipCollaborationCommunicationProblem-solving
Languages:English
Tech Stack:CUDAROCmTensorRTOpenAI TritonFP8BF16FlashAttentionAITERNVIDIAAMDTransformerMoE

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