Design, deploy, optimize, and scale production AI and agentic workloads for strategic customers. Build benchmarking systems, automation tooling, deployment frameworks, starter kits, and operational playbooks. Optimize distributed inference, GPU efficiency, latency, reliability, and cost across AI runtimes and orchestration platforms. Validate new platform capabilities, influence product roadmaps, collaborate with infrastructure and model partners, and enable customer-facing technical teams. The role requires up to 30% travel for customer engagements, workshops, conferences, and collaboration.
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.
The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team operates at the intersection of AI research, production deployment, and customer impact. As an Agentic AI Applied Scientist, you won't sit in an isolated research lab—you will embed directly with high-growth startups, tech innovators, and AI native enterprise partners. You will design, build, and deploy custom autonomous agent architectures running on DigitalOcean’s high-performance AI infrastructure.
What You’ll Do- Architect Production-Ready Agentic Frameworks: Design and implement sophisticated multi-agent workflows, autonomous reasoning loops, and tool-augmented LLM architectures capable of resolving complex, real-world customer challenges.
- Direct Customer Integration: Embed deeply with tech innovators, CTOs, and AI engineering leads to transform ambiguous business requirements into high-performance, deterministic AI/Agentic workflows.
- Synthesize Research and Deployment: Quickly prototype cutting-edge agentic frameworks—leveraging LangGraph, AutoGen, or custom execution graphs—and harden them for enterprise-scale production and stateful memory retention.
- Drive Reliability and Evaluation: Develop comprehensive reusable Evals frameworks and safety guardrails to monitor reasoning precision, execution security, latency, and cost-efficiency across agentic systems.
- Optimize the DigitalOcean Ecosystem: Serve as a strategic feedback link between our customers and core AI/ML Product teams, converting field deployment friction into foundational platform enhancements.
- Platform Validation & Product Acceleration: Act as the “first customer” for DigitalOcean’s AI-native platform capabilities including Inference Engine, runtimes, orchestration systems, GPU platforms, and deployment workflows. Surface real-world operational insights, architectural gaps, and scaling bottlenecks directly to Product Engineering and Research teams.
- Travel & Collaboration Requirements: Ability to travel up to 30% for customer engagements, strategic workshops, conferences, and internal collaboration.
- 6+ years of hands-on experience in Applied AI, Machine Learning, or Data Science.
- Expertise in Multi-agent Frameworks: Proven experience building multi-agent orchestration engines, tool-use / function-calling pipelines, MCP, structured outputs, dynamic planning, and persistent memory models.
- Production Python & Systems Engineering: Strong skills in writing clean, production-ready Python (Pydantic, FastAPI, Asyncio, PyTorch).
- Customer-Facing Engineering Mindset: High empathy, crisp technical communication, and the ability to articulate complex AI trade-offs to both engineering leads and executive sponsors.
- The DO "Shark" Mentality: You think big, bold, and scrappy. You have a bias for action and a powerful sense of ownership over the customer experience.
- Education: Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related technical field.
- Applied Science Experience: Experience in deep learning frameworks (like PyTorch or TensorFlow), distributed training tools as well as various agentic AI frameworks. Solid understanding of various types of transformers and state space models.
- Research Experience: Experience in publications, patents and Knowledge of latest research in the field of LLM, VLM, Agentic frameworks.
- Customer Empathy & Technical Leadership: Ability to translate complex business tasks into AI engineering solutions and collaborate directly with client teams (CTOs, AI Leads).
- Agility: Comfortable navigating fast-moving environments and tuning model workloads for diverse accelerator architectures.
- Vendor & Strategic Partnership Collaboration: Experience collaborating with customers, model vendors, or ecosystem partners on benchmarking, optimization, finetuning, or launch readiness initiatives.
- $167,000 - $209,000
*This is a remote role
JR: 2026-8207
#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 a high-growth trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As part of our team, you’ll embody our "Shark" mindset: bold, ambitious, and scrappy. You'll lead with a bias for action and take true ownership of our products, customer success, and team culture.
- We prioritize career development. At DigitalOcean, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will join a community of exceptional talent, collaborating closely with some of the brightest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance and fast-paced organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our talent development team prioritizes your professional development and provides resources to support your growth. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy.
- We care about your well-being. We take a comprehensive approach to our total rewards packages because we know different things drive different people. Our benefits are designed to support you and may include flexible time off, local team meetups, and mental health and well being support. Our benefits philosophy is consistent globally, but specific benefits and eligibility vary by location to reflect local needs and regulations.
- We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. Eligible employees may also receive equity compensation, which may include a new hire equity grant and, in participating countries, the opportunity to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program. Equity awards are subject to approval and the terms of the applicable plan.
- Non-sales roles: In addition to base salary, this role is eligible to participate in DigitalOcean’s annual bonus plan and may be eligible for a new hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility. Bonus amounts depend on company and individual performance.
- Sales roles (sales compensation eligible): In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible to earn incentive compensation under the applicable sales compensation plan and may be eligible for a new hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility.
- DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
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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What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene
With vibrant neighborhoods, great food and more affordable housing than either coast, Chicago might be the most liveable major tech hub. It is the birthplace of modern commodities and futures trading, a national hub for logistics and commerce, and home to the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. This diverse blend of industry influences has helped Chicago emerge as a major player in verticals like fintech, biotechnology, legal tech, e-commerce and logistics technology. It’s also a major hiring center for tech companies on both coasts.
Key Facts About Chicago Tech
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