Staff AI Architect

The posting, as DigitalOcean wrote it

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 are looking for an Architect who will own the technical shape of how DigitalOcean operates as an AI-native business — the agentic systems our teams build, and the enterprise architecture they plug into.

DigitalOcean is building the substrate for an AI-native company, and this role owns its architecture. The ambition: any team—Finance, People, Sales, Marketing, Support, IT, Engineering—can put a governed agent into a real business workflow in hours or days, on rails that make the safe path the fast path. Credentials and access owned by the platform. Every agent operating under an identity that can be audited. Quality held to evaluation evidence as models and prompts change. Cost per workflow understood before it is committed. Orchestration and observability built once and shared. Getting there is an architecture problem, and it is yours.

Reporting to the Sr. Director of AI & Business Technology Engineering and partnering with the Manager, AI Engineering—who owns people and roadmap while you own technical direction—you will own the architecture end to end: how agents are built and run, how they reach models and enterprise systems, how long-running work is orchestrated, and how identity, audit, and observability run through all of it. You set the technical bar across our distributed team in the US and India.

The role is deliberately hybrid, and we mean all three parts. You are a software architect who sets the standard for how we build; an AI architect who has shipped agentic systems that survived production; and a business systems architect who knows agent quality is a context problem—and that the context lives in Workday, Salesforce, NetSuite, Greenhouse, Snowflake, and Okta, not in the model. Your influence spans all of Business Technology, not just AI Engineering.

One distinctive advantage: DigitalOcean sells the substrate we run on. You will partner with our AI platform organization and build on our own AI platform and inference products—dogfooding that is also the fastest path to enterprise capability. Few architect roles make you the internal design partner to the products you depend on.

This is not an advisory role or a review-board seat. You will write code, build prototypes, publish reference implementations, and pair with engineers on the hard parts. You will also say no—to a design that won't scale, to an agent that shouldn't have write access to the general ledger, to a vendor feature that papers over an architecture problem. Ivory-tower dist
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ofessional development and provides resources to support your growth. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy.

• We care about your well-being. We take a comprehensive approach to our total rewards packages because we know different things drive different people. Our benefits are designed to support you and may include flexible time off, local team meetups, and mental health and well being support. Our benefits philosophy is consistent globally, but specific benefits and eligibility vary by location to reflect local needs and regulations.
• We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. Eligible employees may also receive equity compensation, which may include a new hire equity grant and, in participating countries, the opportunity to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program. Equity awards are subject to approval and the terms of the applicable plan.
• Non-sales roles : In addition to base salary, this role is eligible to participate in DigitalOcean’s annual bonus plan and may be eligible for a new hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility. Bonus amounts depend on company and individual performance.
• Sales roles (sales compensation eligible) : In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible to earn incentive compensation under the applicable sales compensation plan and may be eligible for a new hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility.
• DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.