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Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Seattle

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. 

We are looking for a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer who is passionate about solving complex cloud infrastructure challenges in the fast-growing AI/ML space. This is a high-impact position designed to be the "technical tip of the spear" for our most strategic AI-Native (ANE) customers.

As an FDE, you will sit at the intersection of Product Engineering and Customer Implementation. You will be embedded directly with our most strategic customers to drive transformational AI adoption. You will collaborate closely with customer teams to ship advanced AI applications that solve real world business problems.

You will build the tools, migration scripts, and AI starter kits that don't just solve one customer's problem, but scale the entire DigitalOcean AI Cloud ecosystem. Your mission is to accelerate "time-to-inference" in production at scale and serve as a critical feedback loop, ensuring our product roadmap is informed by the world's most demanding AI workloads.

What You’ll do:

  • Embedded Customer Engineering: Partner deeply with strategic ANEs to manage complex migrations, build production-ready PoCs, and execute hands-on application builds on our GPU infrastructure.
  • Build Scalable Assets & Tooling: Operationalize field learning by building migration planners, reusable systems, benchmarking frameworks, model optimization agents, and deployment automation scripts (e.g., Terraform/Pulumi) that standardize how AI workloads are deployed and tuned across DigitalOcean.
  • Develop AI "Starter Kits": Create pre-built GenAI agents, solution templates, and notebooks (e.g., LangGraph, CrewAI) tailored to popular and advanced business needs.
  • Drive the Product Roadmap: Act as the frontline technical voice for CPTO, surfacing architectural gaps and edge cases to inform core product development. Transition field-built tools into native product features.
  • New Tech Validation: Lead the early testing and integration of emerging AI frameworks to ensure a first-class developer experience on DigitalOcean.
  • Partner & GTM Enablement: Co-develop delivery frameworks with Strategic and Technical partners to enable repeatable, high-quality deployments at scale.
  • Market Leadership: Produce field-tested demo kits and deployment guides that support new product releases with practical, validated assets.

Key Metrics

  • Customer Adoption: Number of high-impact production workloads landed; reduction in average "time-to-production"; and Pilot-to-Production conversion rates.
  • Asset & Tooling Delivery: Number of reusable tools (agents, scripts, playbooks) delivered per quarter and their subsequent adoption rate by the crossfunctional teams and customers.
  • Field Enablement & Scale: Measured by the successful handoff and execution of FDE-defined deployment patterns to technical partners and the internal adoption rate of FDE playbooks across all customer-facing technical teams.
  • Product Influence: Number of roadmap features or architectural changes directly attributed to FDE feedback and validated customer hypotheses.

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean:

  • AI/ML Architecture & Domain Expertise: Significant experience in the AI/ML lifecycle, specifically hosting large language or multimodal models using inference engines like vLLM, SGLang, or Modular. You have a deep understanding of common LLM architectures and optimization techniques (e.g., continuous batching, quantization).
  • Distributed Systems & Infrastructure Mastery: Act as the subject matter expert on modern GPU families (NVIDIA/AMD) and their software stacks (CUDA, ROCm, TensorRT, OpenAI Triton). Expert proficiency in Kubernetes (K8s) and the design of distributed systems, including microservices, messaging systems, databases, and Infrastructure as Code. You can seamlessly integrate AI workloads with core cloud services (Networking, VPC, Storage, Compute).
  • High-Performance Inference & Hardware Optimization: Hands-on experience with distributed inference serving frameworks (e.g., llm-d, NVIDIA Dynamo, or Ray Serve). You understand GPU-level optimization and have experience with interconnect technologies like NVlink, XGMI, or RoCE to maximize hardware efficiency.
  • Software Engineering Foundation: Strong production coding skills in Python or Go with the ability to build high-quality tools, automation, and internal assets.
  • Data-Driven Performance Insight: Proven ability to benchmark AI infrastructure and perform GPU utilization tuning to optimize customer ROI and workload performance.
  • Consultative Execution: Proven ability to establish instant technical credibility with CTOs and Lead Architects while managing high-stakes technical migrations.

Preferred

  • Experience with emerging AI orchestration frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI, or LlamaIndex.
  • A background in technical consulting or "Forward Deployed" roles at high-growth AI or infrastructure companies.
  • Experience building and scaling "Center of Excellence" models or partner delivery frameworks.
  • Active contributor to open-source AI projects or technical communities.

Compensation Range: 

  • $195,000 - $239,000

*This is a hybrid role

JR: 2026-7748

#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 more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful sense of responsibility for customers, products, employees, and decisions.
  • We prioritize career development. At DO, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education. All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
  • We care about your well-being. Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
  • We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.
  • DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.

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