Job Description - Staff Software Engineer, Applied Research at DigitalOcean

Location: Seattle (Hybrid role, 3 days per week on-site in Bellevue, WA office) Role Overview:

• Own technical direction for agent memory in DigitalOcean’s agentic AI systems.
• Focus on how agents store context, retrieve information, update beliefs, personalize experiences, and reason over past interactions.
• Senior individual contributor role with broad technical scope.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, scientists, researchers, engineers, and designers.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the agent memory roadmap: define and execute research agenda for memory-enabled agentic AI including long-term context, retrieval, personalization, and state management.
• Translate user needs and research findings into practical memory architectures improving workflows.
• Stay updated on research frontier in agent memory, retrieval systems, multimodal recall, belief revision.
• Build production memory systems: design architectures for episodic memory, semantic memory, user context, long-term recall.
• Develop reliable systems supporting memory decay, fact grounding, belief updates, context compaction across sessions.
• Create evaluation frameworks measuring memory quality, groundedness, reasoning reliability, personalization quality.
• Provide technical leadership: set direction on architecture, modeling decisions, experimentation strategy without direct management authority.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to move from research ideas to shipped products.
• Communicate complex AI systems clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years experience building production AI/ML systems including LLM-powered products and retrieval or personalization systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with memory and retrieval systems such as embeddings, semantic search, knowledge graphs, RAG.
• Strong understanding of agentic AI concepts: memory, planning, tool use, state management.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python plus at least one production systems language.
• Ability to balance research quality with product impact and communicate tradeoffs clearly.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building memory/retrieval/personalization or long-context systems in production.
• Experience with agent evaluation and user outcome measurement.
• Prior senior IC experience (Staff or Senior Staff).
• Master’s or PhD in CS/ML/AI or equivalent industry experience.
• Experience with production ML infrastructure (model serving etc.).
• Research contributions via publications or patents related to AI agents or applied ML.

Compensation Range: $216,800 - $271,000 Additional Information:

• Hybrid work model requiring 3 days per week onsite at Bellevue office starting day one.
• DigitalOcean values innovation with purpose and career development opportunities.
• Equal opportunity employer with comprehensive benefits.

Application process includes submitting personal details and voluntary self-identification surveys.