Staff AI Architect
$191k - $239k • Boston • Full-time
Posted 2mo ago
This job has been open for more than 60 days. It may no longer be actively hiring, so check with the company before putting a lot into an application.
Job Location
Boston
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
AI Agent Engineer
About the job
DigitalOcean is seeking an AI Architect to define the technical vision for how the company operates as an AI-native business. This role will own the architecture for agentic systems and the enterprise architecture they integrate with, enabling any team to deploy governed agents into business workflows quickly and safely. You will be responsible for the end-to-end architecture, including how agents are built and run, their interaction with models and enterprise systems, long-running work orchestration, and the implementation of identity, audit, and observability. This is a hands-on role involving coding, prototyping, and setting technical standards across distributed teams.
Responsibilities
- Own the AI reference architecture, defining patterns and standards for agentic systems including orchestration, tool use, memory, retrieval, evaluation, and observability.
- Design, prototype, and code complex components, publishing reference implementations for others to build upon.
- Architect the internal AI platform, shaping shared services for model access, agent runtimes, evaluation, durable orchestration, and developer experience.
- Design the tool and capability layer, defining how agents discover and invoke versioned, schema-defined tools with clear ownership and evaluation gates.
- Establish integration, identity, and authorization patterns for agents to safely interact with enterprise systems of record.
- Re-architect business processes to be AI-native by understanding workflows and identifying high-leverage opportunities.
- Set the standard for governance and safety, embedding capability boundaries, human approval, autonomy, audit trails, and lifecycle management into the architecture.
- Own the unit economics by designing for cost per completed task, including model selection, context management, caching, batching, and cost attribution.
- Make architectural decisions legible and durable through RFCs and ADRs, ensuring stable interfaces and defining technical standards for AI development, deployment, and operation.
- Multiply the team's impact by setting the technical bar, mentoring engineers, and serving as an escalation point for cross-team design decisions.
- Partner across the company with platform engineering, security, identity, data, and program management teams.
- Serve as a technical advisor to business stakeholders.
Requirements
- Proven experience as a software architect.
- Shipped agentic systems that have survived production.
- Understanding that agent quality is a context problem, with context residing in business systems like Workday, Salesforce, NetSuite, Greenhouse, Snowflake, and Okta.
- Experience with enterprise systems integration, identity, and authorization patterns.
- Ability to understand business workflows and design AI-native solutions.
- Experience designing for governance, safety, and cost efficiency in AI systems.
- Ability to write RFCs and ADRs to document architectural decisions.
- Mentorship experience.
- Experience working with distributed teams.