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. What You’ll Be Doing Own the feedback learning roadmap Define and execute the applied research agenda for feedback-driven agentic AI — from reward modeling and preference optimization to online learning and human feedback loops. Translate user feedback, human evaluation data, and product signals into concrete training and optimization strategies. Stay close to the research frontier on RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, GRPO, and related methods and know when to apply them versus when simpler approaches win. Build production learning systems Design and implement learning loops that improve agent reasoning, planning, tool use, and action execution over time. Build evaluation frameworks that measure what matters: reasoning quality, instruction following, task success, safety, and real user outcomes — at both offline and online scale. Run large-scale experiments that connect model changes to measurable improvements in user experience and business impact. Provide technical leadership Set technical direction across modeling, experimentation strategy, evaluation design, and production readiness — without requiring direct management authority. Partner closely with product, engineering, design, and research teams to move work from prototype to shipped capability. Communicate complex AI systems clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean We're looking for engineers who have shipped real learning systems — not just prototyped them. You likely bring: 8+ years of experience building production AI/ML systems — LLMs, GenAI, agentic systems, recommendation, search, personalization, or applied research at scale. Hands-on experience improving AI systems through reinforcement learning, reward modeling, fine-tuning, human feedback, or preference optimization — with results you can point to. Strong understanding of agentic AI: reasoning, planning, tool use, action execution, instruction following, and self-correction. Strong software engineering in Python and at least one production systems language. The judgment to balance model quality, product impact, latency, reliability, cost, and maintainability — and communicate those tradeoffs clearly. Preferred Qualifications Strong signal Experience with agent evaluation, offline/online experiments, and human feedback loops in production. Direct experience with RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, GRPO, or related optimization techniques. Prior Staff, Senior Staff, Tech Lead, or equivalent senior IC experience. Nice to have Master's or PhD in CS, ML, AI, or a related field — or equivalent depth demonstrated through industry work. Experience with production ML infrastructure: model serving,…