Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Strategic Accounts

Company Overview

Deepgram is bringing the world’s most natural interface, voice, to the technology we use every day. Our speech models and real-time infrastructure power AI systems that keep up with the way people actually speak. More than 5,000 organizations run conversational voice AI on Deepgram in production, including Twilio, Cloudflare, Sierra, Decagon, Vapi, Cresta, Granola, and Jack in the Box.

The Deepgram Voice Agent Platform brings together speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech, with voice-native foundation models available through cloud APIs or self-hosted and on-premises deployments. Built for accuracy, low latency and cost efficiency, Deepgram makes high-quality voice experiences practical to build and run at scale. More than 650,000 developers have used Deepgram to process more than 200,000 years of audio. Every day, more of the world’s conversations with AI run on our models.

Operating Principles:

Deepgram is a research company that productizes as fast as possible. Four Operating Principles shape how we think, decide, and work together:

• Compress before you communicate. You think it through first, then lead with the bottom line.

• Resist entropy. You question what already exists before adding more process or tools.

• Solve the category. You fix recurring problems at the source, not one case at a time.

• Work at the frontier. You go after problems no one has solved yet.

We look for people who already work this way, and these principles shape how we grow and evaluate our team.

AI-First by Default

We build AI that millions of people talk to, and we run the company the same way. AI is how we centralize work here, and is core to how we operate.

That means more than using the tools. We expect you to:

• Build, not just use. Design your own workflows and agents, and use AI to remove whole categories of work instead of doing the same work faster.

• Own the output. AI can speed up the work. It doesn’t make anyone less accountable for it. You understand, verify, and stand behind everything you share, including what an agent produces for you.

• Spend the time you get back at the frontier. The capacity AI creates goes toward problems no one has solved yet.

• Keep pace. Models and tools change every month, and so will your work. You adopt what’s new quickly and drop what no longer earns its place.

We judge AI by what it helps you deliver and whether you stand behind the result, not by how often you use it. In interviews, expect to walk us through a workflow you built and where you drew the line between AI and your own judgment.

Opportunity:

Enterprise restaurant deployments are where voice AI meets the messiness of the real world: legacy systems, high transaction volumes, operational edge cases, and technology that has to work reliably during the busiest moments of the day.

In this role, you will embed with leading restaurant brands and technology partners to make those deployments successful. You will learn how their systems work, design the integration path, write code, troubleshoot production issues, and adapt Deepgram’s platform to the constraints of live restaurant operations. You will work directly with customer engineering teams and business leaders, owning the technical path from early discovery through go-live and optimization.

Your impact will extend beyond any single customer. You will identify patterns across deployments, translate field learnings into product improvements, and build the tools, reference architectures, and playbooks that help the team deploy faster and more reliably across large restaurant fleets.

This role is for an engineer who wants direct ownership of customer outcomes and enjoys turning complex, ambiguous deployments into repeatable systems. The goal is simple: make every Deepgram for Restaurants deployment feel effortless to the customer and deliver measurable value from day one.

Location:

This role is based in New York City or San Francisco, where many of our customers and partners are located. Being close to them helps us move quickly and stay connected to their needs.

This role also includes occasional travel to meet with customers, support sales engagements, and participate in key onsite interactions.

What You’ll Own:

• Customer engineering partnership: Embed with customer engineering teams as a trusted technical peer. Lead technical discovery and solutioning for prospects and customers.

• Technical integration and deployment: Own the end-to-end technical implementation of Deepgram’s voice AI platform for enterprise customers — from scoping and architecture through go-live and optimization.

• Configuration and customization: Adapt and configure Deepgram’s platform to meet each customer’s unique operational requirements — menu structures, ordering flows, POS integrations, edge cases, and everything in between.

• Production excellence: Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve technical issues in live deployments. Serve as an escalation point for complex technical issues when necessary.

• Deployment infrastructure leadership: Codify patterns into tools, playbooks, reference architectures, and building blocks the broader team can use for other deployments and customers.

• Feedback loop to product and engineering: Translate real-world deployment challenges into actionable requirements for Deepgram’s product and engineering teams. You are the voice of the customer inside the building.

You’ll Love This Role If You:

• You are hands-on. You write code, read logs, and ship fixes — you don’t just coordinate. When a customer has a technical problem, you roll up your sleeves and solve it.

• You operate with extreme ownership and urgency. You treat every customer deployment as if your name is on the product.

• You partner closely with Sales, Product, and Engineering, but you are just as comfortable on a customer’s Slack channel walking their team through an API integration.

It’s Important To Us That You Have:

• Technical depth: You are an excellent software engineer. You are comfortable working across APIs, SDKs, webhooks, cloud infrastructure, and customer tech stacks. You use AI coding tools to move fast and multiply your output.

• Customer obsession: Deep, personal commitment to your customers’ technical success. You take their problems home with you. You are not satisfied until the deployment is bulletproof.

• High slope: Learns fast, adapts quickly, and stays effective in ambiguity without needing constant structure. You figure things out and move forward. You are excited to get your hands dirty solving gritty technical problems over sexy ones.

• Communication and trust: Able to build deep credibility with both technical and non-technical stakeholders on the customer side. You are calm under pressure and relentlessly reliable.

It Would Be Great if You Had:

• Experience with voice AI, speech-to-text, NLP, or conversational AI systems.

• Previous early-stage startup or founder-led environment experience — you thrive in environments where you wear many hats and build from zero.

• Previous experience embedded within a large enterprise customer’s product deployment.

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