Senior Software Engineer I - AI Inference Data Plane

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. 

• 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.
• 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 load balancing on queue depth, cache locality, and predicted latency; flow control and fairness across tenants; autoscaling inference pools; and moving gigabytes of KV-cache between prefill and decode instances with negligible overhead.
• Open Source Contributions: Contribute upstream to llm-d, vLLM, and the inference gateway ecosystem, and represent DigitalOcean in these communities.
• 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.

• AI/ML Domain Knowledge: Hands-on experience hosting large language or multimodal models using inference engines like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT.
• Inference Frameworks: Familiarity with distributed inference serving frameworks such as llm-d, NVIDIA Dynamo, or Ray Serve.
• Inference Engine Depth: Hands-on experience with vLLM or alternatives (SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, TGI, Modular MAX), including internals like continuous batching, paged attention, and prefix caching.
• Distributed Inference Fluency: Understanding of why cluster-scale serving is hard: KV-cache locality is partitioned across workers, naive round-robin routing destroys cache hit rates and tail latency, and disaggregated prefill/decode requires fast cross-pod KV transfer (e.g., NIXL).
• Upstream Track Record: Merged contributions to vLLM, llm-d, SGLang, or similar projects strongly preferred.
• 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.

• $139,200 - $174,000

*This is a remote role

JR: 2026-7624

#LI-Remote