We are looking for a Principal Engineer to define the technical direction and architecture for AI Data Infrastructure at DigitalOcean. This role will lead the design, development, and operation of services that help AI-native applications ground, retrieve, reason over, and remember data at scale. These services will power DigitalOcean's Agentic AI and Inference customers by providing production-grade knowledge bases, vector search, hybrid retrieval, context management, memory systems, and graph-based data infrastructure.
As a Principal Engineer, you will work across engineering, product, platform, and customer-facing teams to build foundational AI data services that are reliable, performant, scalable, cost-efficient, and simple for developers to use. You should be equally comfortable setting long-term architecture, making hard technical trade-offs, mentoring senior engineers, and going deep into system design when the business depends on getting the architecture right.
We are looking for someone who can span technical strategy and hands-on execution-someone who has strong distributed systems judgment, understands database and retrieval system internals, and can turn emerging AI infrastructure patterns into durable cloud services.
What You'll Do- Architect and guide the implementation of high-scale, reliable, secure AI data infrastructure services for agentic and inference workloads.
- Define the technical architecture for vector databases, knowledge bases, hybrid search, semantic search, context graphs, agent memory, and retrieval orchestration.
- Make foundational decisions on indexing, storage layout, sharding, replication, caching, query execution, ranking, consistency, latency, availability, and cost-performance trade-offs.
- Design systems that support multiple retrieval patterns, including dense vector search, keyword/BM25 search, metadata filtering, reranking, graph traversal, and context-aware retrieval.
- Build and operate managed services that customers can trust for production AI workloads, including observability, SLOs, capacity planning, backups, upgrades, failover, and disaster recovery.
- Partner with product managers and engineering leaders to translate customer needs and business priorities into a clear multi-year technical roadmap.
- Collaborate with Inference, Managed Databases, Storage, Kubernetes, App Platform, IAM, and Observability teams to ensure AI data services are deeply integrated into the DigitalOcean platform.
- Identify architectural bottlenecks, scaling risks, retrieval quality gaps, operational weaknesses, and cost inefficiencies before they become customer-impacting problems.
- Establish engineering standards, design review practices, operational mechanisms, and technical decision frameworks for AI data infrastructure.
- Mentor engineers across teams and raise the bar for architectural rigor, operational excellence, systems thinking, and customer impact.
- Stay current with advances in vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation, graph databases, memory systems, embedding models, reranking, agent frameworks, and AI data management.
Key ResponsibilitiesArchitect and Build- Design and evolve distributed AI data systems optimized for low latency, high recall, high availability, strong operational control, and efficient unit economics.
- Lead architecture for vector indexing and retrieval systems, including ANN algorithms, HNSW-style indexes, quantization, compression, partitioning, filtering, and recall-latency trade-offs.
- Architect knowledge base infrastructure, including ingestion, chunking, embedding generation, indexing, metadata management, retrieval, reranking, evaluation, and re-indexing workflows.
- Design context management and memory systems that enable agents to persist, retrieve, summarize, and reason over relevant state across sessions and tasks.
- Evaluate when to use vector search, lexical search, relational stores, object storage, graph databases, or purpose-built retrieval layers-and design clean integration patterns across them.
- Take a hands-on technical leadership role when needed to unblock delivery, validate architecture, or guide implementation of critical systems.
Reliability, Performance, and Scale- Own architectural mechanisms for availability, failover, durability, capacity management, tenant isolation, cost controls, and operational safety.
- Lead performance tuning across ingestion, embedding, indexing, query serving, graph traversal, reranking, and retrieval pipelines.
- Define SLOs and operational dashboards for latency, throughput, recall quality, freshness, availability, error rates, cost, and customer-visible reliability.
- Drive automation for provisioning, upgrades, scaling, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and fleet operations.
- Build systems that scale from small developer workloads to large production AI applications with billions of objects, high-dimensional vectors, high query volume, and strict latency expectations.
Technical Leadership- Set the technical vision for AI Data Infrastructure and influence architecture across multiple teams.
- Lead design reviews and author technical proposals that clarify trade-offs, risks, sequencing, and long-term platform implications.
- Establish standards for service design, APIs, data modeling, observability, operational readiness, testing, and production excellence.
- Mentor senior and staff engineers, helping them make better architectural decisions and operate with higher technical judgment.
- Create a culture where engineers understand not only how a system works, but why the design is correct for the customer and business.
Cross-functional Collaboration- Work with product, engineering, design, sales engineering, support, and go-to-market teams to understand customer problems and convert them into scalable platform capabilities.
- Partner with customer-facing teams on architecture patterns for AI-native applications, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, and enterprise knowledge systems.
- Translate complex technical concepts into clear guidance for executives, product leaders, engineering teams, and customers.
- Help define migration and adoption paths for customers moving from self-managed vector databases, custom RAG pipelines, fragmented knowledge stores, or prototype agent memory systems to DigitalOcean-managed services.
Innovation and Future Roadmap- Research and evaluate emerging technologies in vector databases, graph databases, AI memory, context engineering, retrieval evaluation, multimodal indexing, and agent data infrastructure.
- Identify which capabilities DigitalOcean should build, partner for, or integrate from open source.
- Build durable platform primitives rather than one-off features, ensuring DigitalOcean's AI data services remain simple, composable, open, and cost-effective.
- Drive the evolution from basic retrieval infrastructure toward intelligent data systems that help agents learn, remember, and improve over time.
Key Metrics- Availability, latency, durability, and operational health of AI data services.
- Retrieval quality, freshness, recall, precision, and reranking effectiveness.
- Time to ingest, index, re-index, and make customer data queryable.
- Cost efficiency across storage, memory, compute, indexing, and query serving.
- Customer adoption of knowledge bases, vector search, hybrid retrieval, and agent memory capabilities.
- Engineering velocity, architectural clarity, and reduction of operational toil.
- Successful integration with DigitalOcean Inference, Managed Databases, Storage, Kubernetes, and App Platform services.
What You'll Add to DigitalOcean- 12+ years of experience designing and building distributed systems, databases, storage systems, search infrastructure, data platforms, or cloud infrastructure at scale.
- Deep technical expertise in vector databases, search systems, database internals, or distributed data infrastructure.
- Strong understanding of vector indexing, ANN search, hybrid search, semantic search, metadata filtering, reranking, query planning, storage engines, caching, replication, and high availability.
- Experience designing or operating production-grade services for AI, data, search, analytics, databases, or retrieval-heavy workloads.
- Familiarity with knowledge base systems, retrieval-augmented generation, embedding pipelines, chunking strategies, context windows, memory systems, and agentic AI application patterns.
- Experience with graph databases, knowledge graphs, context graphs, or graph-based retrieval is strongly preferred.
- Strong systems architecture judgment, including the ability to reason through consistency, latency, availability, durability, cost, scale, and operational trade-offs.
- Hands-on experience with cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, observability systems, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and production operations.
- Fluency in one or more backend systems languages such as Go, Java, C++, Rust, or Python.
- Proven ability to lead large, ambiguous, cross-team technical initiatives without relying on formal authority.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex architecture clearly to both technical and business audiences.
- A track record of mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across an organization.
Compensation Range:*This is a hybrid role
#LI-Hybrid
