Principal Infrastructure Architect

Drive the future of DigitalOcean by designing its Compute, GPU, Storage, and Infrastructure platforms. As a Principal Infrastructure Architect on the Hardware Engineering team, you own the forward-looking roadmap for CPU, GPU, storage, and infrastructure hardware platforms as the industry evolves from air to liquid to 800VDC rack scale systems, collaborating with peers on the Infrastructure and Networking teams who own the roadmaps for datacenters and networking.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and own hardware architectures for next-generation compute environments across CPU, GPU, Storage, and Infrastructure server SKU products, navigating shifts in technology, networking topologies, and AI/ML requirements.
• Serve as the primary technical stakeholder for infrastructure technologies, partnering with subject matter experts in the Product and Hardware Engineering organizations.
• Provide leadership and guidance as a primary stakeholder in the hardware selection and qualification process.
• Evangelize emerging technical concepts to senior leadership to inform product and business strategies.
• Architect end-to-end server designs with vendors and partner teams to support a wide variety of CPU, GPU, and other emerging workloads.
• Architect end-to-end storage topologies to support diverse workloads across performance, capacity, and archival tiers, moving from direct-attached to disaggregated and software-defined storage.
• Lead proof-of-concept initiatives for emerging infrastructure technologies and transition successful pilots into global deployment standards.
• Mentor engineers at all levels and represent DigitalOcean in the broader community through conferences, papers, and presentations.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in server architecture, storage architecture, infrastructure engineering, or a related field, with a track record of owning and deploying designs at scale.
• Deep expertise in server and storage hardware platforms, from commodity CPU servers to rack scale GPU and xPU platforms.
• Working experience driving AI/ML hardware roadmaps and translating evolving silicon, accelerator, memory, and storage trends into future-proofed platform designs.
• Knowledge of emerging approaches such as CXL memory pooling, DPUs/SmartNICs, disaggregated storage, and computational storage.
• Demonstrated ability to lead proof-of-concept initiatives and scale successful pilots into global deployment standards.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with technical and business teams, external vendors, and partners.