AI Research Engineer Jobs in Seattle, WA
AI Research Engineer jobs in Seattle, Washington concentrate in South Lake Union, the University District, and Bellevue's Eastside tech corridor, across cloud computing, enterprise AI, and life sciences sectors with employers like ByteDance, TikTok, and Apple actively hiring. Demand is strong and consistent, with openings ranging from applied ML research to foundation model development. See the openings below and apply to the ones that match your experience.
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Showing 5 of 37+ AI Research Engineer jobs
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 building the Agentic Inference Cloud — anchored by Inference Engine, our model-serving platform — to help fast-growing AI-native companies start, scale, and optimize agentic workloads. Applied Research is the layer that generates the proprietary science that compounds across that platform: routing that learns instead of following static rules, memory that improves recall and personalization, observability that explains why agents succeed or get stuck, and reinforcement learning that closes the loop between production signals and model behavior.
We're hiring a Director of Research to build and lead this function: set the research agenda, grow the team, and make sure the science this group produces ships into real product outcomes — better model selection and routing, more reliable agents, lower cost and latency, and higher task-success rates for the developers and enterprises running agentic workloads on DigitalOcean.
This is a hybrid role by design: enough technical depth to personally evaluate and shape research direction across routing, memory, observability, and RL, and enough leadership range to build a team, prioritize against a roadmap, and defend research investment to product and executive stakeholders.
What You'll Do
Set the research agenda
- Define and own the applied research roadmap across adaptive routing (evolving model selection from static rules into a system that learns from real usage, cost, and latency), memory (retrieval quality and durable recall for long-running agents), agent observability (understanding when agents make progress, get stuck, or make mistakes), and reinforcement learning / closed-loop learning (turning production feedback into better models and policies).
- Track emerging model architectures and specialized, domain-tuned model approaches, and translate what's relevant into DigitalOcean's product roadmap.
- Keep the agenda tightly coupled to product outcomes — every research bet should map to a measurable improvement in model selection, agent reliability, cost/latency, or task-success rate, not research for its own sake.
Build and lead the team
- Grow the Applied Research team, hiring and mentoring research scientists and engineers.
- Establish the team's operating rhythm: how research questions get scoped, how experiments get run and evaluated, and how findings hand off to production teams.
- Represent Applied Research in cross-functional planning cycles alongside other engineering and product leaders, and make the case for headcount and investment on its own merits.
Bridge research and product
- Partner directly with Inference Engine and the other platform and product engineering teams that own agent runtime and evaluation infrastructure to turn research into shipped capability.
- Turn research prototypes into production-ready capabilities in partnership with engineering — shipping research, not just publishing it.
- Communicate research trade-offs clearly to non-research stakeholders, including when a promising direction isn't ready for product investment yet.
Represent DigitalOcean externally
- Build DigitalOcean's credibility in the applied agentic-AI research community through publications, talks, open-source contributions, or collaborations — where they serve product and hiring goals.
What You'll Add to DigitalOcean
- 10+ years in applied ML/AI research or research-adjacent engineering, including experience leading a research team or function — formal people management or clear de facto technical leadership of a research group.
- Deep, hands-on expertise in at least two of: LLM routing and model selection, retrieval and memory systems, agent observability and evaluation, or reinforcement learning (RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, GRPO, or related methods).
- A track record of shipping research into production systems — not just publishing or prototyping it.
- Fluency with the current agentic AI landscape: reasoning, planning, tool use, long-horizon memory, and the practical economics of large-scale model serving.
- Strong technical communication — able to defend a research agenda to engineering leaders, product leaders, and executives, and to translate ambiguous research questions into a roadmap with concrete checkpoints.
Preferred Qualifications
Strong signal
- Experience building or scaling an applied research team inside a product organization (not a pure research lab), with research investment justified in business terms.
- Direct experience with inference infrastructure or large-scale model-serving optimization.
- Familiarity with the broader open-weight and open-source model ecosystem.
Nice to have
- PhD in CS, ML, or a related field — or equivalent depth demonstrated through industry impact.
- Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in routing, memory, agent evaluation, or reinforcement learning.
- Experience with small, specialized models or domain-tuned LLMs.
Compensation Range:
- $249,600 - $312,000
- This is a hybrid role
JR: 2026-8125
#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.
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 building the Agentic Inference Cloud — anchored by Inference Engine, our model-serving platform — to help fast-growing AI-native companies start, scale, and optimize agentic workloads. Applied Research is the layer that generates the proprietary science that compounds across that platform: routing that learns instead of following static rules, memory that improves recall and personalization, observability that explains why agents succeed or get stuck, and reinforcement learning that closes the loop between production signals and model behavior.
We're hiring a Director of Research to build and lead this function: set the research agenda, grow the team, and make sure the science this group produces ships into real product outcomes — better model selection and routing, more reliable agents, lower cost and latency, and higher task-success rates for the developers and enterprises running agentic workloads on DigitalOcean.
This is a hybrid role by design: enough technical depth to personally evaluate and shape research direction across routing, memory, observability, and RL, and enough leadership range to build a team, prioritize against a roadmap, and defend research investment to product and executive stakeholders.
What You'll Do
Set the research agenda
- Define and own the applied research roadmap across adaptive routing (evolving model selection from static rules into a system that learns from real usage, cost, and latency), memory (retrieval quality and durable recall for long-running agents), agent observability (understanding when agents make progress, get stuck, or make mistakes), and reinforcement learning / closed-loop learning (turning production feedback into better models and policies).
- Track emerging model architectures and specialized, domain-tuned model approaches, and translate what's relevant into DigitalOcean's product roadmap.
- Keep the agenda tightly coupled to product outcomes — every research bet should map to a measurable improvement in model selection, agent reliability, cost/latency, or task-success rate, not research for its own sake.
Build and lead the team
- Grow the Applied Research team, hiring and mentoring research scientists and engineers.
- Establish the team's operating rhythm: how research questions get scoped, how experiments get run and evaluated, and how findings hand off to production teams.
- Represent Applied Research in cross-functional planning cycles alongside other engineering and product leaders, and make the case for headcount and investment on its own merits.
Bridge research and product
- Partner directly with Inference Engine and the other platform and product engineering teams that own agent runtime and evaluation infrastructure to turn research into shipped capability.
- Turn research prototypes into production-ready capabilities in partnership with engineering — shipping research, not just publishing it.
- Communicate research trade-offs clearly to non-research stakeholders, including when a promising direction isn't ready for product investment yet.
Represent DigitalOcean externally
- Build DigitalOcean's credibility in the applied agentic-AI research community through publications, talks, open-source contributions, or collaborations — where they serve product and hiring goals.
What You'll Add to DigitalOcean
- 10+ years in applied ML/AI research or research-adjacent engineering, including experience leading a research team or function — formal people management or clear de facto technical leadership of a research group.
- Deep, hands-on expertise in at least two of: LLM routing and model selection, retrieval and memory systems, agent observability and evaluation, or reinforcement learning (RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, GRPO, or related methods).
- A track record of shipping research into production systems — not just publishing or prototyping it.
- Fluency with the current agentic AI landscape: reasoning, planning, tool use, long-horizon memory, and the practical economics of large-scale model serving.
- Strong technical communication — able to defend a research agenda to engineering leaders, product leaders, and executives, and to translate ambiguous research questions into a roadmap with concrete checkpoints.
Preferred Qualifications
Strong signal
- Experience building or scaling an applied research team inside a product organization (not a pure research lab), with research investment justified in business terms.
- Direct experience with inference infrastructure or large-scale model-serving optimization.
- Familiarity with the broader open-weight and open-source model ecosystem.
Nice to have
- PhD in CS, ML, or a related field — or equivalent depth demonstrated through industry impact.
- Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in routing, memory, agent evaluation, or reinforcement learning.
- Experience with small, specialized models or domain-tuned LLMs.
Compensation Range:
- $249,600 - $312,000
- This is a hybrid role
JR: 2026-8125
#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.
See All 37 AI Research Engineer Jobs in Seattle
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Find AI Research Engineer JobsAI Research Engineer Job Market in Seattle
Who's Hiring
- ByteDance16
- TikTok5
- Apple4
- Cisco1
- Google1
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software
- Electronics & Hardware
- Science & Research
- Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals
AI Research Engineer Jobs in Seattle: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a ai research engineer job in Seattle?
The strongest path into Seattle's ai research engineer market is through its cloud and enterprise AI sector, which anchors hiring in South Lake Union and the Eastside. Candidates with hands-on experience in large language models, reinforcement learning, or ML infrastructure have a clear edge. Publishing research, contributing to open-source projects, and engaging with Seattle's dense university and tech community all help applicants stand out in a competitive local pool.
Which companies hire ai research engineers in Seattle?
Employers hiring ai research engineers in Seattle right now include ByteDance, TikTok, and Apple, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of September 2026. Seattle's hiring landscape is especially deep among large cloud platform companies, AI-native startups in South Lake Union, and life sciences firms applying machine learning to research and clinical workflows.
Are there remote ai research engineer jobs in Seattle?
Yes, though the role skews toward hybrid given the collaboration-heavy nature of research teams and access to on-site compute clusters. About 19% of ai research engineer openings tied to Seattle are remote or hybrid as of September 2026, reflecting the broader flexibility that tech employers in the region have adopted. Fully remote positions tend to cluster around applied research and data-focused tracks rather than core model training roles.
How can I get a ai research engineer job in Seattle with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path in Seattle is through a research internship or residency at one of the city's large cloud or AI platform companies, which run structured programs for recent graduates. University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science feeds directly into local hiring pipelines, and adjacent roles like ML engineer or research scientist associate are common stepping stones. A strong portfolio of published work or open-source contributions matters more than years of experience for most Seattle employers at this level.
Which industries hire the most ai research engineers in Seattle?
The sectors hiring the most ai research engineers in Seattle are Technology & Software, Electronics & Hardware, and Science & Research, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of September 2026. Seattle's concentration of cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, and biotech companies creates sustained demand across both foundational model research and applied AI product development.
Related Jobs in Washington
See All 37 AI Research Engineer Jobs in Seattle
Find roles in Seattle that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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