Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE), Strategic Accounts

Deepgram • San Francisco, CA

1d • $197,000 - $246,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

• A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or a record of building that speaks for itself
• Hands-on experience developing and deploying backend systems that run in production, whether through internships, co-ops, your first years in industry, or projects that shipped to live users
• Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and API design
• The instinct to proactively recognize problems and to care about the impact of your work
• Relationship building — You genuinely enjoy getting to know the people that you work with, and you invest in those relationships beyond what the immediate task requires.
• Reading the room — You notice who in a meeting is engaged, who is skeptical, and what is going unsaid.
• Acting on what you notice — When you spot an opening, whether a stakeholder with a problem that you can solve or a question behind the question, you move on it.
• Coachability — Nobody arrives with all of this polished. We'll teach the craft. We look for the appetite to learn it and openness to feedback along the way.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with audio or voice interfaces
• Experience building and maintaining a system that integrates with many third-party APIs, particularly point-of-sale systems
• Experience taking a system from zero to one
• Depth in one or more modern languages (our field work spans Python, JavaScript and TypeScript, Rust, Go, Kotlin, and whatever your customer runs), and the flexibility to pick up the next one
• Experience with containerization tools, such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Any experience being the technical person in front of a non-technical audience (teaching, tutoring, demos, hackathons, support)

Responsibilities

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level