Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

<div class="content-intro"><p>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. &nbsp;We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world.&nbsp;</p></div><p>We are looking for a <strong>Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)</strong> who is passionate about operationalizing production AI-native and agentic workloads at scale. This is a high-impact role designed to serve as the “technical tip of the spear” for DigitalOcean’s most strategic AI-native customers and platform initiatives.</p> <p>As an FDE, you will operate at the intersection of Product Engineering, AI Infrastructure, and Customer Implementation. You will partner deeply with strategic AI-native enterprises (ANEs), startups, infrastructure vendors, and internal engineering teams to deploy, optimize, and scale production AI systems on DigitalOcean’s AI-Native Cloud.</p> <p>This role extends beyond traditional GPU infrastructure deployment. You will work across Inference Engine, runtime systems, orchestration frameworks, and AI-native applications to help customers operationalize production AI and agentic systems with strong focus on scalability, reliability, latency, and workload economics.</p> <p>FDE engineers also act as the “first customer” for new AI-native platform capabilities. You will validate products under real-world workloads, surface operational insights and architectural gaps, and help accelerate product maturity through continuous feedback loops with Product Engineering and Research teams.</p> <p>You will build scalable deployment frameworks, benchmarking systems, automation tooling, and AI starter kits that transform field learning into reusable platform intelligence and repeatable deployment patterns across the DigitalOcean ecosystem.</p> <p>Your mission is to accelerate production adoption of AI-native systems while helping shape the future of DigitalOcean’s AI-Native Cloud for the inference and agentic era.</p> <h2><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Strategic AI Workload Operationalization: </strong>Partner with strategic ANEs and AI startups to architect, deploy, optimize, and scale production AI and agentic systems on DigitalOcean’s AI-Native Cloud. Support complex migrations, production-ready PoCs, deployment acceleration, and long-term workload expansion across inference and runtime platforms.</li> <li><strong>AI Performance &amp; Systems Engineering: </strong>Optimize