Senior AI/ML Engineer II

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 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 between $231,000 - $286,000 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. 
• We value diversity and inclusion. We are an equal-opportunity employer, and recognize that diversity of thought and background builds stronger teams and products to serve our customers. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. 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.

*This is a remote role

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