Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE), Strategic Accounts

The posting, as Deepgram wrote it

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Deepgram is the leading platform underpinning the emerging trillion-dollar Voice AI economy, providing real-time APIs for speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and building production-grade voice agents at scale. More than 200,000 developers and 1,300+ organizations build voice offerings that are ‘Powered by Deepgram’, including Twilio, Cloudflare, Sierra, Decagon, Vapi, Daily, Cresta, Granola, and Jack in the Box. Deepgram’s voice-native foundation models are accessed through cloud APIs or as self-hosted and on-premises software, with unmatched accuracy, low latency, and cost efficiency. Backed by a recent Series C led by leading global investors and strategic partners, Deepgram has processed over 50,000 years of audio and transcribed more than 1 trillion words. There is no organization in the world that understands voice better than Deepgram.

COMPANY OPERATING RHYTHM

At Deepgram, we expect an AI-first mindset—AI use and comfort aren’t optional, they’re core to how we operate, innovate, and measure performance.

Every team member who works at Deepgram is expected to actively use and experiment with advanced AI tools, and even build your own into your everyday work. We measure how effectively AI is applied to deliver results, and consistent, creative use of the latest AI capabilities is key to success here. Candidates should be comfortable adopting new models and modes quickly, integrating AI into their workflows, and continuously pushing the boundaries of what these technologies can do.

Additionally, we move at the pace of AI. Change is rapid, and you can expect your day-to-day work to evolve just as quickly. This may not be the right role if you’re not excited to experiment, adapt, think on your feet, and learn constantly, or if you’re seeking something highly prescriptive with a traditional 9-to-5.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Most engineering roles ask you to build the platform. This one asks you to build everything between the platform and a customer's success: the solutions, integrations, and tooling that run in production for some of the largest enterprises in the world.

Deepgram is seeking Forward-Deployed Engineers for our strategic accounts. You'll embed with one strategic customer at a time, working directly with their technical and business teams, alongside Deepgram's core research teams. Today's engagements center on leading restaurant enterprises and restaurant technology partners (we already partner with several of the world's leading restaurant brands), and the examples in this posting come from that work.

As a Forward-Deployed Engineer, you'll take Deepgram's voice AI platform the last mile. That means production-scale integrations with the systems that your customer actually runs on (today, that's point of sale, loyalty, payment gateways, and customer data platforms), voice agents that take live orders from customers every day, and everything in between: the tooling, prompt engineering, and evaluatio
[…]
s-on experience developing and deploying backend systems that run in production, whether through internships, co-ops, your first years in industry, or projects that shipped to live users

• Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and API design
• The instinct to proactively recognize problems and to care about the impact of your work

And because you'll be in the room with customers, we look for the raw materials of customer-facing craft:

• Relationship building — You genuinely enjoy getting to know the people that you work with, and you invest in those relationships beyond what the immediate task requires.
• Reading the room — You notice who in a meeting is engaged, who is skeptical, and what is going unsaid.
• Acting on what you notice — When you spot an opening, whether a stakeholder with a problem that you can solve or a question behind the question, you move on it.
• Coachability — Nobody arrives with all of this polished. We'll teach the craft. We look for the appetite to learn it and openness to feedback along the way.

IT WOULD BE GREAT IF YOU HAD

• Experience working with audio or voice interfaces
• Experience building and maintaining a system that integrates with many third-party APIs, particularly point-of-sale systems
• Experience taking a system from zero to one
• Depth in one or more modern languages (our field work spans Python, JavaScript and TypeScript, Rust, Go, Kotlin, and whatever your customer runs), and the flexibility to pick up the next one
• Experience with containerization tools, such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Any experience being the technical person in front of a non-technical audience (teaching, tutoring, demos, hackathons, support)

Notice: We're aware of individuals impersonating Deepgram recruiters. All legitimate Deepgram recruiting communication comes from an @deepgram.com http://deepgram.com email address. If you've received a message claiming to be Deepgram, please forward it to careers@deepgram.com.