Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE), Strategic Accounts

About this role

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 evaluation work that bridges what Deepgram offers today and what makes your customer successful tomorrow.

Forward-deployed means you do this work with your customer, not just for them. You'll be on site regularly, embedded with their technical team, and close enough to the business to see problems before they become escalations. You'll also have a senior Forward-Deployed Engineer alongside you, reviewing your work before it ships and bringing you into customer meetings. And the platform is not a fixed product that you implement. When your customer needs a capability that the platform does not offer yet, you'll be the one who proves what it should do next, and what you build and learn in the field becomes part of Deepgram's offering for every customer after yours.

ABOUT FORWARD-DEPLOYED ENGINEERING AT DEEPGRAM

Forward-Deployed Engineering is how Deepgram embeds with its most strategic accounts. You'll fully deploy into a dedicated account pod (a small, cross-functional team built around one strategic customer) for a defined stretch, working inside of that account's day to day with a high degree of autonomy. Full deployment means exactly that: while you're deployed, your pod's account is your only customer assignment, with no time split across other accounts or teams. Your work directly shapes how some of the world's largest brands put voice AI in front of their customers.

Forward-Deployed Engineers are part of our broader Applied Engineering team, which serves as the technical interface between Deepgram and our customers across their entire journey (it combines what other companies split into Forward-Deployed Engineering, Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Implementation, and Technical Support). Applied Engineering is your home team and your growth path. You'll be hired into the Applied Engineer position, which has a single growth ladder from Associate through Principal, and you'll grow proficient across multiple roles over time. The pod is where you're deployed; Applied Engineering is where you grow.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Build and ship whatever the solution needs, whether that's an end-to-end service, an integration, internal tooling, or agent and prompt engineering

- Design, develop, and maintain production-scale integrations with the third-party systems that your customer runs on (in today's pods: point of sale, loyalty, payment gateways, customer data platforms)

- Spend regular time on site with your customer, working directly with their technical and business teams

- Monitor, debug, and optimize what you ship in production, including some of the hardest audio environments in voice AI (noisy, multi-mic, drive-thru)

- Work with our research and product teams to push the platform where your customer needs it to go, and feed what you learn in the field back into the product

- Test changes against live production data and measure whether they move accuracy, latency, and throughput

TIME ALLOCATION

- Embedded customer delivery (60-8

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