Senior AI/ML Engineer II

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’re building the next generation of agentic applications on the GradientAI platform—where multi-agent systems of LLM-powered agents collaborate, make decisions, and adapt at scale. You’ll be part of the team designing robust, scalable, and safe agent workflows that empower developers to build sophisticated AI-driven systems with confidence.

We’re looking for someone with a strong software engineering background and deep expertise in generative AI, multi-agent system design, guardrails, monitoring, and evaluation methodologies. Your work will directly shape how thousands of developers create and scale AI agents on our platform.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Architect and deliver production-grade agentic systems: multi-agent orchestration, workflow management, state/memory handling, and runtime governance.
• Design and orchestrate modular, LLM-powered agents (e.g., Planner, Tool Executor, QA, Validator) using scalable orchestration patterns (sequential, router, parallel, map-reduce), with clear handoff protocols, shared memory, and structured communication.
• Define and enforce guardrails and governance: prompt sanitization, access control, audit trails, threat modeling, and strategies for injection defense, hallucination control, misuse prevention, and compliance.
• Establish evaluation and monitoring methods for multi-agent systems: accuracy, safety, cost, and latency—leveraging observability practices (logs, telemetry, tracing, capturing intermediate outputs) and feedback loops to continuously refine performance.
• Build fine-tuning and deployment pipelines: supervised fine-tuning, inference optimization, post-deployment updates, and scaling hardened systems with retries, error handling, and fairness checks.
• Rapidly define and deliver MCPs (Minimum Capable Products): identify minimal agent roles and orchestration logic, validate quickly, and expand iteratively into robust multi-agent applications.
• Integrate seamlessly with the GradientAI platform: ensuring agents leverage DO services (inference, KBs, Functions, storage, networking) for scale, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
• Apply strong software engineering practices: testing, CI/CD, code quality, scalable architectures, and distributed system design.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, infra teams, design and UX, and other engineers to ship features that developers adopt and trust.
• Participate and support in operational excellence
• Independently ship product features from planning to launch to maintenance with high autonomy
• Collaborate with other engineers to find elegant architectures and solutions

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean:

• Proven experience in software development at scale, with strong foundations in distributed systems, system design, and cloud-native engineering.
• Hands-on experience in shipping AI/ML systems into production.
• Drive observability, guardrails, and evaluation best practices for multi-agent workflows, ensuring visibility, safety, and continuous improvement.
• Partner closely with UX and design teams to ensure agentic features deliver simple, intuitive, and developer-first experiences.
• Contribute to platform-level improvements (component libraries, reusable tools, design systems) that accelerate adoption and developer productivity.
• Mentor and support teammates in applying guardrails, governance, and orchestration patterns consistently across projects.
• Ability to balance engineering trade-offs (reliability, latency, cost) with business outcomes.
• 5+ years of relevant industry experience in software engineering and deploying agentic AI systems in production within high-growth environments.

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 b