Staff Forward Deployed Engineer
DigitalOcean5 months ago
Base Salary
$195k - $239k/yr
Responsibilities
- Embed with strategic AI-native customers to manage complex migrations, build production-ready proofs of concept, and deliver applications on GPU infrastructure.
- Build reusable migration planners, systems, benchmarking frameworks, model optimization agents, and Terraform or Pulumi deployment automation.
- Create GenAI agents, solution templates, and notebooks using frameworks such as LangGraph and CrewAI.
- Provide technical feedback to product leadership, identify architectural gaps, and transition field-built tools into native product features.
- Lead testing and integration of emerging AI frameworks to improve the DigitalOcean developer experience.
- Co-develop delivery frameworks with strategic and technical partners to enable repeatable deployments at scale.
- Produce field-tested demonstration kits and deployment guides supporting new product releases.
- Drive production customer adoption, reduce time to production, deliver reusable tooling, enable partner handoffs, and influence product roadmap changes.
Requirements
- Significant experience with the AI/ML lifecycle, including hosting large language or multimodal models and using inference engines such as vLLM, SGLang, or Modular.
- Deep understanding of LLM architectures and optimization techniques such as continuous batching and quantization.
- Expertise with NVIDIA and AMD GPU families, CUDA, ROCm, TensorRT, OpenAI Triton, Kubernetes, distributed systems, and infrastructure as code.
- Hands-on experience with distributed inference serving frameworks such as llm-d, NVIDIA Dynamo, or Ray Serve.
- Experience with GPU-level optimization and interconnect technologies such as NVLink, XGMI, or RoCE.
- Strong production coding skills in Python or Go.
- Proven ability to benchmark AI infrastructure, tune GPU utilization, and optimize workload performance and customer return on investment.
- Proven ability to establish technical credibility with CTOs and lead architects while managing high-stakes technical migrations.
- Preferred experience with LangGraph, CrewAI, or LlamaIndex.
- Preferred background in technical consulting or forward-deployed roles at high-growth AI or infrastructure companies.
- Preferred experience building and scaling Center of Excellence models or partner delivery frameworks.
- Active contribution to open-source AI projects or technical communities is preferred.
Benefits
- Remote role.
- Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
- Access to LinkedIn Learning with more than 10,000 courses.
- Employee Assistance Program, local employee meetups, and flexible time off.
- Eligible employees may receive equity compensation and participate in the Employee Stock Purchase Program.
- Bonus eligibility may be available based on company and individual performance.
Tech Stack
Categories
Forward Deployed
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.