Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML
DigitalOcean3 months ago
Base Salary
$217k - $271k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and execute the applied research roadmap for feedback-driven agentic AI.
- Translate user feedback, human evaluations, and product signals into training and optimization strategies.
- Design and implement learning loops that improve agent reasoning, planning, tool use, and action execution.
- Build evaluation frameworks for reasoning quality, instruction following, task success, safety, and real user outcomes.
- Run large-scale experiments linking model changes to user experience and business impact.
- Set technical direction across modeling, experimentation, evaluation, and production readiness without direct management authority.
- Partner with product, engineering, design, and research teams to move prototypes into shipped capabilities.
- Communicate complex AI systems and technical tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of experience building production AI/ML systems.
- Hands-on experience with reinforcement learning, reward modeling, fine-tuning, human feedback, or preference optimization.
- Strong understanding of agentic AI, including reasoning, planning, tool use, action execution, instruction following, and self-correction.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python and at least one production systems language.
- Ability to balance model quality, product impact, latency, reliability, cost, and maintainability.
- Experience with agent evaluation, offline and online experiments, and human feedback loops is preferred.
- Experience with RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, GRPO, or related optimization techniques is preferred.
- Master’s or PhD in computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or a related field, or equivalent depth demonstrated through industry work, is preferred.
- Experience with model serving, observability, data pipelines, feature stores, or experimentation platforms is preferred.
- Research contributions through publications, patents, open-source work, or demonstrated applied research impact are preferred.
Benefits
- Hybrid work arrangement.
- Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
- Access to LinkedIn Learning courses.
- Employee Assistance Program, local employee meetups, and flexible time off.
- Potential bonus and equity compensation, including equity grants and an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
Tech Stack
Categories
About DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean provides cloud infrastructure and platform services for developers, startups, and small to mid-sized businesses, including virtual machines (Droplets), managed Kubernetes and databases, object/block storage, networking, and GPUs for AI workloads. It operates a usage-based, self-service public cloud with APIs, CLI, and a marketplace to deploy and scale applications. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, DigitalOcean is a public company listed on the NYSE.