Senior Engineer II, GPU Kernel and Performance

Dive in and do the best work of your career at DigitalOcean. Journey alongside a strong community of top talent who are relentless in their drive to build the simplest scalable cloud. If you have a growth mindset, naturally like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment of a true industry disruptor, you’ll find your place here.  We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world. 

DigitalOcean is seeking a Senior Engineer 2 to play a key technical role in our GPU Kernel and Performance team. DigitalOcean aims to be the Inference Cloud of choice for digitally native companies and you will help ensure we can offer the industry-leading performance for our inference services. You will be responsible for the architectural decisions that maximize throughput and minimize latency for the world’s most advanced large models. As an IC leader, you will act as a force multiplier for the engineering organization, solving the most complex bottlenecks in memory bandwidth and compute utilization while guiding the technical roadmap for our high-performance inference fleet.

What You’ll Do:

• Kernel Engineering: Design and implement high-performance GPU kernels using Triton and CUDA C++.


• Precision Optimization: Develop and deploy state-of-the-art quantization techniques (FP8, INT8, and experimental FP4) to double throughput without losing accuracy.


• Memory Magic: Optimize memory access patterns (SRAM vs. HBM3e) to eliminate bottlenecks in long-context attention mechanisms.


• Research to Production: Implement the latest architectural breakthroughs like FlashAttention-4 and TileLang directly into our production stack.

What You’ll Bring:

• Low-Level Mastery: Deep understanding of GPU architectures (SMs, Warp scheduling, Tensor Cores).


• The Toolkit: Expert-level Triton or CUDA. If you’ve contributed to the Triton compiler or wrote custom CUDA kernels for a major LLM, we want you.


• Math Foundation: Strong grasp of linear algebra and how it maps to parallel hardware.


• Performance Obsession: A track record of optimizing kernels to achieve >80% of theoretical hardware peak performance.

Compensation Range: 

• $167,200.00 to $209,000

*This is a hybrid role

JR: 2026-7593

#LI-Hybrid

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

• We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful sense of responsibility for customers, products, employees, and decisions.


• We prioritize career development. At DO, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education. All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.


• We care about your well-being. Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.


• We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.


• DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.