Senior Software Engineer - Applied AI

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.

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. If you’re energized by experimenting, adapting, and learning constantly, you’ll thrive here. Expect your day-to-day to evolve as fast as the technology does.

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

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