Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML

Digital Ocean
Seattle
Workplace: HybridFull timeFunction: Software EngineeringExperience: 8+ yearsSkills: ["Leadership","Communication"]

Senior IC role driving the applied research and production learning systems for agentic AI at DigitalOcean. You will own the feedback-driven learning roadmap, design scalable learning loops, and lead technical direction across modeling, experimentation, and production readiness to ship real learning systems that impact user outcomes and product decisions.

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FursaFursa
Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean
2 months ago

Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML

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

Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 18 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Senior IC role driving the applied research and production learning systems for agentic AI at DigitalOcean. You will own the feedback-driven learning roadmap, design scalable learning loops, and lead technical direction across modeling, experimentation, and production readiness to ship real learning systems that impact user outcomes and product decisions.
Location: Seattle
Workplace: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Software Engineering

Key Responsibilities

  • •Own the feedback learning roadmap — define and execute the applied research agenda for feedback-driven agentic AI, translate user feedback into training and optimization strategies, and stay close to RLHF/RLAIF/DPO/PPO/GRPO frontiers.
  • •Build production learning systems — design learning loops to improve agent reasoning and action execution, create evaluation frameworks for offline/online measurement, and run large-scale experiments linking model changes to user outcomes and business impact.
  • •Provide technical leadership — set direction across modeling, experimentation, and production readiness; collaborate with product, engineering, design, and research teams to ship features; communicate complex AI systems to diverse stakeholders.
  • •Partner with product, engineering, design, and research teams to move work from prototype to shipped capability and ensure alignment with product goals.
  • •Communicate complex AI systems clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Key Requirements

  • •8+ years of experience building production AI/ML systems — LLMs, GenAI, agentic systems, recommendation, search, personalization, or applied research at scale.
  • •Hands-on experience improving AI systems through reinforcement learning, reward modeling, fine-tuning, human feedback, or preference optimization — with results you can point to.
  • •Strong understanding of agentic AI: reasoning, planning, tool use, action execution, instruction following, and self-correction.
  • •Strong software engineering in Python and at least one production systems language.
  • •The judgment to balance model quality, product impact, latency, reliability, cost, and maintainability — and communicate those tradeoffs clearly.
Experience:8+ yearsAI/MLCloudProduction AI
Skills:LeadershipCommunication
Languages:English
Tech Stack:PythonReinforcement learningRLHFRLAIFDPOPPOGRPO

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