---
title: 'Senior Engineer II, Inference Engine - Serving Engine at DigitalOcean'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-engineer-ii-inference-engine-serving-engine-digitalocean-san-francisco-xz6bswr3kdc3'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Senior Engineer II, Inference Engine - Serving Engine at DigitalOcean

- **Company:** DigitalOcean
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Posted:** 2026-03-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/position/apply/?gh_jid=7714467

## Job description

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 II to join our AI Inference Engine Systems 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 components hosting large generative AI models.
- System Design: Architect and refine system design proposals for our high-scale, multi-tenant AI inference cloud ecosystem, ensuring they meet rigorous availability and resiliency standards.
- Performance Optimization: Implement and optimize distributed 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.
- Mentorship: Coach and mentor junior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
- Operational Excellence: Maintain and operate critical, high-scale services, utilizing observability tools and defining SLOs to ensure superior platform health.

What You’ll Bring to DigitalOcean:

- Distributed Systems Expertise: Strong experience with microservices, messaging systems, databases, and infrastructure as code.
- AI/ML Domain Knowledge: Hands-on experience hosting large language or multimodal models using inference engines like vLLM, SGLang, or Modular.
- Inference Frameworks: Familiarity with distributed inference serving frameworks such as llm-d, NVIDIA Dynamo, or Ray Serve.
- Hardware & Interconnects: Understanding of GPU-level optimization and experience with interconnect technologies like NVlink, XGMI, or RoCE.
- Architecture Proficiency: Knowledge of common LLM architectures and optimization techniques (e.g., 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 remote role

JR: 2026-7591

#LI-Remote

## 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.

## About DigitalOcean

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: DigitalOcean provides a simple, scalable cloud platform for developers, startups, and SMBs, and is now building an AI-native cloud with inference and managed agent services.
- **Entity Type**: Public (NYSE: DOCN)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, USA
- **Founded**: 2012
- **Founders**: Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Jeff Carr, Alec Hartman, Mitch Wainer

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cloud computing, AI infrastructure
- **Target customers**: Developers (B2B), startups, and small-to-medium businesses (Digital Native Enterprises)
- **Mission**: “Simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world.” [digitalocean.com/about](https://www.digitalocean.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Droplet**: Simple, scalable virtual machines for any workload.
- **Managed Kubernetes**: Container orchestration with easy management.
- **App Platform**: Fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling apps.
- **Inference Engine**: AI inference service offering over 70 models (open-weight and frontier), with serverless, dedicated, or batch inference and an Inference Router for cost optimization. [digitalocean.com](https://www.digitalocean.com/)
- **Managed Agents**: Production-ready AI agents that run on the same integrated stack as inference and infrastructure, avoiding cross-vendor hops and egress fees.
- **Core Infrastructure**: 20 data centers across 11 regions, air- and liquid-cooled GPU clusters (NVIDIA H100/H200/Blackwell, AMD Instinct MI300X/MI325X/MI350X) with 400G RoCE fabric.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available in provided sources (public company; check NYSE: DOCN)
- **Key Metric**: Over 640,000 customers globally; more than 1,500 employees (as of early 2026). [digitalocean.com/blog/why-2026-is-the-year-to-join-digitalocean](https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/why-2026-is-the-year-to-join-digitalocean)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: As a public company, its shareholders include institutional investors. No specific partners listed in recent company materials.
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid headcount growth (1,500+ employees), strong customer base expansion (640k+), and a strategic pivot to an “agentic cloud” with new AI products in public preview.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Simplicity**: Known for developer-friendly interfaces and documentation that reduce complexity compared to larger cloud providers.
- **Integrated AI Stack**: Covers five layers (infrastructure, inference, agents, etc.) in one platform, eliminating cross-vendor integration costs and egress fees.
- **Cost-Effectiveness**: Transparent pricing and competitive latency (e.g., 3.9× higher output speed vs. AWS Bedrock, independently benchmarked on DeepSeek V3.2). [digitalocean.com](https://www.digitalocean.com/)
- **Community**: Strong open-source and developer community contributions.

## Strategic Focus
- Building the “comprehensive agentic cloud” – a fully integrated stack for AI-powered applications.
- Expanding inference and managed agent capabilities to attract digital native enterprises.
- Investing in GPU infrastructure (NVIDIA and AMD) and global data center expansion.

## Why Work Here
- **Work Model**: Offers fully remote, hybrid (three days in office), and in-office options depending on role and location. Offices in the US (Austin, Boston, Denver, SF Bay Area, Seattle), India (Hyderabad), and Pakistan (Karachi). [digitalocean.com/careers](https://www.digitalocean.com/careers)
- **Culture**: Values are Fast, Simple, Bold, Proud, Love, Community, and Growth. Emphasis on ownership, bias for action, and thinking big.
- **Compensation**: Competitive base salaries at market midpoint, annual bonus targets, performance equity grants, and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).
- **Benefits**: Generous wellness benefits, flexible PTO, above-average parental leave, health insurance (medical, dental, vision, mental health), 401(k) with safe harbor match, life insurance, and income protection.
- **Professional Development**: Unlimited access to LinkedIn Learning, education reimbursement for courses/certifications, book program, conference attendance, and internal learning opportunities.
- **Interview Process**: Human resume review (no bots), recruiter video call, hiring manager interview, then team interviews. Accommodations available. [digitalocean.com/careers](https://www.digitalocean.com/careers)
- **Perks**: Monthly internet/phone stipend, wellness stipend, home office setup allowance, milestone and anniversary gift programs, employee giving match via Groundswell.

## Sources
1. [DigitalOcean Careers Page](https://www.digitalocean.com/careers)
2. [DigitalOcean About Page](https://www.digitalocean.com/about)
3. [DigitalOcean Product (AI-Native Cloud)](https://www.digitalocean.com/)
4. [Why 2026 is the Year to Join DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/why-2026-is-the-year-to-join-digitalocean)
5. [DigitalOcean Open Roles](https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/open-roles)

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