Staff Software Engineer: AI Inference Data Plane

Dive in and do the best work of your career at DigitalOcean. Journey alongside a strong community of top talent who are relentless in their drive to build the simplest scalable cloud. If you have a growth mindset, naturally like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment of a true industry disruptor, you’ll find your place here. We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world. DigitalOcean is expanding its AI Infrastructure layer to support the next generation of AI-driven applications. We are seeking a Senior Engineer 2 to join our AI Inference Data Plane team. In this role, you will be a key technical leader responsible for designing, developing, and delivering high-scale, resilient data plane services that power our "Inference as a Service" offering. You will work at the intersection of distributed systems and specialized AI hardware to ensure our customers can deploy and scale their models with industry-leading performance and reliability. This is a hands-on role, requiring you to be able to develop high quality software while availing of all the productivity boosts granted by the latest AI coding agents. What You’ll Do: Technical Leadership: Act as a technical leader on the team, driving the end-to-end design, development, and delivery of critical data plane com [... source excerpt omitted ...] tributed inference hosting using techniques like tensor/data parallelism, KV cache optimizations, and smart routing. Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with Product Managers, customer-facing teams, and other engineering teams to align technical roadmaps with customer needs. Distributed Serving at Scale: Build on Kubernetes-native distributed inference frameworks like llm-d (or alternatives such as NVIDIA Dynamo, Ray Serve, KServe) to deliver prefill/decode disaggregation, KV-cache-aware routing, tiered prefix caching, and wide expert parallelism for MoE models. Flow Control & Load Balancing: Solve the distributed-systems problems unique to LLM serving — inference-aware loa [... source excerpt omitted ...] ., continuous batching, quantization). Software Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in GoLang or Python and familiarity with gRPC. Cloud Operations: Proven experience shipping customer-facing software products and running critical services in a high-scale environment similar to DigitalOcean. Open Source Mindset: Experience integrating and building with open-source software. Compensation Range: $167,200 - $209,000 *This is a hybrid role JR: 2026-7593 #LI-Hybrid Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend mo