Software Engineer - Applied AI (Senior or Staff Level)

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

We are seeking an engineer to join our Applied AI team dedicated to solving the toughest problems in voice AI for enterprise customers.

We work directly with some of the largest companies deploying voice AI - from leading conversational AI and customer experience platforms to restaurant enterprises and technology partners - taking on the problems that don't have off-the-shelf answers. Much of the work is zero to one.

Current focus areas include:

Ultra-robust ASR in noisy outdoor environments

Self-service fine-tuning and model adaptation for large enterprise customers

High-accuracy, domain-aware voice agents, including drive-thru and phone ordering

Robust scoring and evaluation of agents

Real-time analytics and operational intelligence

Deeper, more reliable on-site hardware integration

We partner with several leading enterprises today and continue to expand these partnerships.

What you'll do

Design, develop, and maintain scalable, high-performance backend systems for our platform

Improve speech-to-text and text-to-speech quality across an array of environments

Expand robust scoring and evaluation of our agents

Fine-tune and adapt models for customer-specific vocabulary and domains

Optimize the AI pipeline to improve performance in challenging audio environments, robustly handle ambiguous customer requests, and rapidly scale to new domains

Run experiments to validate the product impact of new functionality

Collaborate closely with the team to ensure seamless integration between our ML models, backend and client devices

It's important to us that you have

4+ years of hands-on experience in developing, implementing, and maintaining cloud infrastructure in production

Hands-on applied AI/ML experience that goes beyond using LLMs — training, fine-tuning or adapting models yourself

Experience evaluating AI systems, such as building evaluation or scoring for models or agents

Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to adapt to a rapidly evolving startup environment

Strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively with a team

Willingness to problem solve across our entire product

Ability to proactively recognize problems and identify solutions to those problems

Results oriented and care about the impact of your work

It would be great if you had

Experience working with audio

Experience with speech-to-text or text-to-speech models

Applied research experience, or a background as a research engineer

Experience taking a system from zero to one

Experience building and maintaining a system that integrates with many 3rd party APIs, particularly Point of Sale systems

Experience with Python, Kotlin, or TypeScript

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

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