Director of Research, Agentic AI

The role

The Director of Research will set the research agenda and lead the Applied Research team. This person will ensure research in routing, memory, observability, and reinforcement learning translates into product outcomes for the Agentic Inference Cloud.

What you will do

• Define and own the applied research roadmap across adaptive routing, memory, agent observability, and reinforcement learning.
• Track emerging model architectures and translate them into the product roadmap.
• Map research bets to measurable improvements in model selection, reliability, cost, latency, or task-success rate.
• Grow the Applied Research team by hiring and mentoring research scientists and engineers.
• Establish the team's operating rhythm for scoping, experimenting, and evaluating research.
• Represent Applied Research in cross-functional planning cycles.
• Partner with Inference Engine and other engineering teams to turn research into shipped capability.
• Communicate research trade-offs to non-research stakeholders.
• Build credibility in the applied agentic-AI research community through publications, talks, or open-source contributions.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years in applied ML/AI research or research-adjacent engineering.
• Experience leading a research team or function including formal people management or clear de facto technical leadership.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in at least two of: LLM routing and model selection, retrieval and memory systems, agent observability and evaluation, or reinforcement learning (RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, GRPO,
• A track record of shipping research into production systems.
• Fluency with the current agentic AI landscape: reasoning, planning, tool use, long-horizon memory, and the practical economics of large-scale model serving.
• Strong technical communication.

Nice to have

• Experience building or scaling an applied research team inside a product organization.
• Direct experience with inference infrastructure or large-scale model-serving optimization.
• Familiarity with the broader open-weight and open-source model ecosystem.
• PhD in CS, ML, or a related field — or equivalent depth demonstrated through industry impact.
• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in routing, memory, agent evaluation, or reinforcement learning.
• Experience with small, specialized models or domain-tuned LLMs.

Benefits

• Annual bonus plan
• New hire equity grant
• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education
• Flexible time off
• Local team meetups
• Mental health and well being support
• 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 building the Agentic Inference Cloud to help fast-growing AI-native companies start, scale, and optimize agentic workloads.