Senior Forward Deployed Engineer II (AI/ML)
DigitalOcean6 days ago
Base Salary
$167k - $209k/yr
Responsibilities
- Architect, deploy, optimize, and scale production AI and agentic workloads for strategic customers and AI startups.
- Support complex migrations, production-ready proofs of concept, deployment acceleration, and workload expansion across inference and runtime platforms.
- Benchmark and optimize distributed inference, GPU efficiency, KV-cache usage, speculative decoding, prefill/decode disaggregation, multi-node deployments, latency, and cost.
- Validate AI-native platform capabilities, identify operational and architectural gaps, and communicate insights to Product Engineering and Research teams.
- Build deployment frameworks, benchmarking systems, automation tooling, AI starter kits, fine-tuning workflows, operational playbooks, and reference architectures.
- Collaborate with GPU vendors, model providers, infrastructure partners, and ISVs on technical validation, optimization, co-development, and launch readiness.
- Enable customer-facing and partner teams with deployment patterns, benchmarks, playbooks, demos, and technical guidance.
- Travel up to 30% for customer engagements, workshops, partnerships, conferences, and internal collaboration.
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, ML Engineering, Applied AI Engineering, AI Infrastructure, Technical Consulting, or equivalent customer-facing engineering roles supporting production AI systems.
- Experience designing and operationalizing production inference workloads, agentic runtimes, orchestration frameworks, and AI-native applications.
- Hands-on experience with inference and serving frameworks such as vLLM, SGLang, Ray Serve, NVIDIA Dynamo, or llm-d, and with continuous batching, quantization, KV-cache optimization, and speculative decoding.
- Deep expertise with NVIDIA and AMD GPU platforms and related ecosystems, including CUDA, ROCm, TensorRT, Triton, NCCL, RCCL, NVLink, XGMI, and RoCE.
- Strong proficiency with Kubernetes, distributed systems, networking, storage systems, Infrastructure as Code, and large-scale AI infrastructure architectures.
- Experience with AI orchestration and agent frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, MCP ecosystems, LlamaIndex, and OpenAI Agents SDK.
- Strong production coding skills in Python or Go and experience building tooling, automation systems, deployment workflows, benchmarking frameworks, or operational platforms.
- Proven ability to benchmark and optimize AI infrastructure for scalability, reliability, GPU efficiency, runtime performance, latency, and workload economics.
- Ability to establish technical credibility with CTOs, principal architects, Product Engineering teams, and ecosystem partners while managing strategic production deployments.
- Experience building deployment standards, technical enablement programs, platform adoption frameworks, or ecosystem integration strategies is preferred.
- Active open-source contributions in AI, infrastructure, orchestration, or developer tooling ecosystems are preferred.
- Experience collaborating with GPU vendors, infrastructure providers, model vendors, or ecosystem partners is preferred.
Benefits
- Remote role.
- Salary range of $167,000-$209,000, with potential bonus and equity compensation excluded from the stated base range.
- 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 equity grants upon hire and participate in the Employee Stock Purchase Program.
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.