Staff Software Engineer, Applied Research

DigitalOcean's Applied Research team is building production-grade agentic AI systems with a focus on memory. As a Staff AI/ML Engineer, you'll own the technical direction for agent memory—how agents store context, retrieve information, and personalize experiences. This senior IC role involves setting the applied research agenda, designing memory architectures, and shipping prototypes to production.

• Own the agent memory roadmap: define and execute applied research for memory-enabled AI, including long-term context, retrieval, personalization, and state management.
• Build production memory systems: design architectures for episodic memory, semantic memory, user context, and long-term recall.
• Develop evaluation frameworks for memory quality, groundedness, reasoning reliability, and personalization.
• Provide technical leadership across architecture, modeling decisions, experimentation, and production readiness.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, design, science, and research teams.

• 8+ years building production AI/ML systems, LLM products, agentic workflows, retrieval systems, or applied research at scale.
• Hands-on experience with memory and retrieval systems: embeddings, semantic search, knowledge graphs, RAG, personalization.
• Strong understanding of agentic AI: memory, planning, tool use, state management, instruction following, self-correction.