Staff AI Architect
DigitalOcean2 months ago
Base Salary
$191k - $239k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own DigitalOcean's AI reference architecture covering agent orchestration, tool use, capability boundaries, memory and state, retrieval, evaluation, and observability.
- Design and build shared AI platform services for model access and routing, agent runtimes, evaluation harnesses, durable workflows, and self-service developer experiences.
- Write code, build prototypes, publish reference implementations, and work directly with engineers on complex components.
- Define versioned, schema-defined capability and tool patterns using open standards such as the Model Context Protocol.
- Establish secure integration, identity, authorization, audit, and provenance patterns for agents operating against enterprise systems of record.
- Partner with business teams to understand workflows and ship AI-native improvements across finance, recruiting, sales operations, support, IT, and other functions.
- Design governance and safety mechanisms including human approval, evaluation-based autonomy, capability boundaries, audit trails, and lifecycle management.
- Control unit economics through model routing, context management, caching, batching, and cost attribution.
- Document durable architectural decisions through RFCs and ADRs and set technical standards for AI development, deployment, and operations.
- Mentor engineers across the US and India, lead architecture reviews, act as an escalation point, and partner with platform engineering, security, identity, data, and program management teams.
Requirements
- Typically 10+ years of experience as a software, solution, or enterprise architect, including ownership above a single project or team.
- Recent production experience building LLM and agentic systems, including orchestration, MCP tooling, retrieval, vector stores, evaluation, versioning, regression testing, observability, and cost attribution.
- Depth in at least one production language: Python, Go, TypeScript, or Java.
- Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, serverless systems, APIs, event-driven patterns, and observability.
- Experience architecting and integrating enterprise systems such as Workday, Salesforce, NetSuite, Greenhouse, or ServiceNow.
- Experience with API and event-driven integration architecture, workflow and iPaaS platforms, and cloud data platforms.
- Understanding of agent identity, scoped secrets, delegation, default-deny access, prompt-injection defense, audit trails, and the OWASP Agentic AI risk landscape.
- Fluency with AI governance frameworks and regulations including NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, and the EU AI Act.
- Ability to translate ambiguous business workflows into bounded AI systems and influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience collaborating across time zones and distributed teams, including teams in India, and comfort with a remote or hybrid environment.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Bonus qualifications include enterprise AI developer-tool rollouts, audited finance or people-process transformation, A2A, SPIFFE/SPIRE, agent registries, evaluation and observability tools, knowledge graphs, GraphRAG, ADRs, C4 modeling, portfolio rationalization, or TOGAF.
Benefits
- Remote role.
- Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
- Access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses.
- Employee Assistance Program, local employee meetups, and flexible time off.
- Eligible employees may receive bonuses, equity grants, and access to an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
- Hybrid collaboration with engineering teams across the US and India and near the Boston/Cambridge community is referenced in the posting.
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.