Principal Software Engineer

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.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer, AI/ML Security who is passionate about securing AI systems and operationalizing ML-powered security at cloud scale.In this role, you will join the CISO’s organization and partner closely with Security Data Science and Security leadership teams. You will lead DigitalOcean’s engagement with the external AI security community and serve as our internal expert and escalation point for all AI-related security risk.

• Partner with Product Security and Engineering leadership to define how AI security controls are integrated into DigitalOcean’s customer-facing products

• Partner with Security Data Science to build and deploy detection strategies, guardrails, and security tooling/automations. Partner with Security Engineering to implement online and batch inference endpoints to serve in-house AI/ML models. Participate in ongoing monitoring of deployed models to detect drift, evaluate performance, and plan and implement improvements alongside model stakeholders.

• Adversarial testing / AI red teaming: lead jailbreak, prompt-injection, evasion, poisoning, and model-extraction testing

• Lead security reviews of major AI product initiatives from design through launch, providing architectural sign-off and escalation guidance for high-risk decisions.

• Threat modeling across the AI lifecycle: data ingestion, training/fine-tuning, evaluation, model serving, RAG, agent frameworks, and post-deployment monitoring

• Own and drive DigitalOcean’s AI Security strategy and multi-year roadmap, defining where we invest, what risks we prioritize, and how AI security evolves as the threat landscape and product portfolio change.

• Architect and lead the AI Risk & Governance framework: establishing policies, standards, and controls for the responsible development, deployment, and monitoring of AI/ML systems across DigitalOcean and Cloudways.

• Represent AI security at executive and board-level briefings; communicate risk posture, program progress, and strategic decisions to the CISO and senior leadership in clear, business-contextualised terms.

• Define DigitalOcean’s position on emerging AI security topics including agentic AI, model supply chain risk, synthetic data integrity, and AI-enabled social engineering

• Overall 15+ years of experience in cybersecurity, with at least 4–5 years focused on AI/ML security, adversarial machine learning, or security data science in a production cloud or technology environment.

• Demonstrated track record of defining and driving AI or security programs at an organizational level — not just executing within them. You have owned a strategy, not just implemented one.

• Deep, practitioner-level knowledge of adversarial ML attack and defence: evasion, poisoning, model extraction, membership inference, and prompt injection at both conceptual and implementation depth.

• Ability to read, evaluate, and synthesise academic AI security research and translate it into concrete engineering guidance and organizational policy.

• Experience engaging executive and senior leadership audiences on technical risk: you can translate complex AI threat scenarios into business-level impact and justify investment