Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML
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.
Building AI agents that take real actions is the easy part. Building agents that get better over time — that learn from feedback, correct mistakes, and optimize toward outcomes users actually care about — is one of the hardest open problems in production AI today.
That's what this team works on. As a Staff AI/ML Engineer on our Applied Research team, you'll own the technical direction for feedback-driven learning in DigitalOcean's agentic systems: reward modeling, preference optimization, reinforcement learning, and the evaluation infrastructure needed to measure whether any of it is actually working.
This is a senior IC role with broad technical scope. You'll set direction, run experiments at scale, and close the loop between user signals and model behavior - shipping research into production, not just writing it up.
