Staff AI Architect

The role

You will own the technical architecture for how DigitalOcean operates as an AI-native business. You will design agentic systems, build prototypes, and define standards for orchestration, identity, and observability across enterprise workflows.

What you will do

• Own the AI reference architecture and define patterns for agentic systems
• Design, prototype, and code ambiguous components and publish reference implementations
• Architect the internal AI platform including model access, runtimes, and evaluation harnesses
• Design the tool and capability layer using open standards
• Establish integration, identity, and authorization patterns for enterprise systems
• Re-architect business processes to be AI-native
• Set standards for governance, safety, and audit trails
• Design for unit economics including cost per completed task
• Write RFCs and ADRs to make architectural decisions legible
• Mentor engineers across the US and India

Required qualifications

• Substantial experience as a software, solution, or enterprise architect (typically 10+ years)
• Recent experience building LLM and agentic systems that ran in production
• Experience with agent orchestration (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI Agents SDK, or equivalents)
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) tooling
• Experience with retrieval and vector stores
• Experience with LLMOps discipline
• Depth in at least one production language (Python, Go, TypeScript, or Java)
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, serverless, APIs, event-driven patterns, observability)
• Experience architecting on and integrating Workday, Salesforce, NetSuite, Greenhouse, ServiceNow, or similar
• Experience with API and event-driven design, workflow and iPaaS platforms (Workato, MuleSoft, Boomi, n8n, or equivalents)
• Experience with cloud data platforms
• Effective distributed collaboration across time zones

Nice to have

• Experience deploying AI developer tooling at scale (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent)
• Experience re-engineering finance, people, GTM, or support processes in enterprise systems
• Familiarity with emerging agent interoperability and identity work (A2A, agent registries, SPIFFE/SPIRE, MCP authorization spec)
• Experience with agent evaluation and observability tooling (LangFuse, Arize, Braintrust, LangSmith, OpenTelemetry-based tracing, or equivalents)
• Knowledge of knowledge graphs, semantic layers, or ontology modeling (including GraphRAG patterns)
• Enterprise architecture practice experience (reference architectures, ADRs, C4 modeling, portfolio rationalization) or TOGAF

Benefits

• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education
• Flexible time off
• Local team meetups
• Mental health and well being support
• Equity compensation
• Employee Stock Purchase Program

Before you apply

• You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period

About the company

DigitalOcean is a technology company that builds the simplest scalable cloud. They aim to build the substrate for an AI-native company.