Applied ML Engineer - Edge Devices

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.

About the role

Deepgram's speech models are among the fastest and most accurate in the world, and today we run them at scale on NVIDIA GPUs. Our customers increasingly need those same models on hardware we don't control: non-NVIDIA accelerators, edge servers, and embedded platforms with their own inference runtimes, operator sets, and constraints. Getting Deepgram models onto those platforms, with as few changes to the model as possible and no changes to the hardware paradigm, is the job.

As an Applied ML Engineer on the Partner Platform Engineering team, you sit one layer above the metal. You take a Deepgram model as it exists today and adapt it to run correctly and efficiently within a target platform's existing kernel and runtime paradigm: swapping or reshaping operators, adjusting architecture parameters, choosing quantization and precision schemes, and validating accuracy and latency on the real device. Where a standard kernel isn't enough, you work with our Embedded AI Engineers, who write the custom kernels, and fit the model to what they build. You also own the deployment process that gets those adapted models onto edge targets repeatably.

This is not a research role and not a cloud-serving role. It is applied ML for edge deployment. It is a great fit for a senior engineer who has already shipped models to non-GPU or edge hardware and wants to do it across many platforms, or a staff-level engineer who wants to define how Deepgram ports speech models to new hardware. We'll set the level to your experience.

What you'll do

• Port Deepgram speech models to non-NVIDIA and edge platforms, adapting model structure and parameters so they run within the target's existing operator set, runtime, and kernels with minimal modification.

• Own serving-side model decisions for edge targets: quantization and precision choices, operator substitution, graph rewrites, and architecture tweaks that fit a model to a device's constraints while holding accuracy and latency.

• Validate every port on real hardware: build accuracy, latency, throughput, and memory benchmarks per platform, and catch regressions before a customer does.

• Build the deployment path for edge targets: model packaging, conversion pipelines, versioning, and automated delivery so shipping a model to a new device is repeatable rather than bespoke.

• Work with Embedded AI Engineers when a standard kernel isn't enough: specify what the model needs, then adapt the model to use the custom kernel they deliver.

• Partner with platform and silicon vendors on their runtimes and toolchains, and turn their expected model format and operator conventions into a working Deepgram deployment.

• Feed edge constraints back to Research and Impeller so future models are easier to port, without taking on research or core productionization work yourself.

• As the team grows, take on adjacent production concerns at the edge: automated deployment, model security and integrity on customer hardware, and fleet-level observability.

You'll love this role if you

• Have already fought to get a model running on hardware that wasn't built for it, and want to do that across many platforms.

• Prefer changing the model to fit the hardware over changing the hardware to fit the model, and know when each is the right call.

• Care about the numbers on the device, not the numbers in the notebook.

• Like being the bridge between the team writing kernels and the team training models.

• Want to ship to customers, not publish.

It's important to us that you have

• Hands-on experience deploying ML models to edge or non-NVIDIA hardware in production. This is required. Cloud-only or GPU-only serving experience does not qualify on its own.

• Working knowledge of quantization and precision tradeoffs (INT8, FP16, mixed precision, calibration) and how they affect accuracy and latency on real targets.

• Experience with at least one edge or vendor inference runtime and its conversion toolchain (for example ONNX Runtime, TFLite, ExecuTorch, OpenVINO, Qualcomm AI Engine, or a vendor NPU SDK).

• Ability to modify a model to fit a platform: reading and rewriting model graphs, swapping unsupported operators, and adjusting architecture parameters without breaking accuracy.

• Strong Python and PyTorch, and production-quality engineering habits: tests, reproducibility, and benchmarks that others can rerun.

• Comfort building automation around model conversion and deployment.

• A builder mindset and clear communication: you can scope a port on an unfamiliar platform and drive it to a measured result.

It would be great if you had

• Experience with speech, audio, or streaming/real-time models specifically.

• Exposure to writing or reading low-level kernels (CUDA, Metal, NEON, or vendor DSP code), enough to collaborate closely with embedded engineers.

• Experience with model security or integrity on deployed devices: signing, encrypted model storage, safe updates.

• Familiarity with several accelerator families (Qualcomm, Apple, ARM, Intel, AMD, or custom NPUs) and their quirks.

• A track record of building internal tooling that made porting or deploying models measurably faster.

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