Forward Deployed Engineer, Onboarding

AssemblyAI•Remote - New York, NY

23h•Hybrid

About The Position

AssemblyAI builds best-in-class Voice AI models powering the next generation of voice applications. The company is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to drive new-customer activation across its product lines. This role owns the initial phase of the go-to-market funnel, from a developer's first API call to their first month of production traffic. Responsibilities include proactively engaging with customers as their usage increases, debugging technical issues to unblock deals, tuning model configurations for specific use cases, and guiding leads through security, paperwork, and architectural decisions to achieve consistent production usage. This is a cross-functional role requiring collaboration with Sales, Support, Product, and Engineering teams, demanding a willingness to wear many hats, a passion for unblocking customers, and high energy to manage multiple concurrent leads with expansive ownership. The ideal candidate is deeply interested in the developer experience of building with voice AI, possesses a strong software engineering background, and has the instincts of a great seller, acting as an equal part engineer and quota-carrier.

Requirements

2+ years of relevant experience as a software engineer, forward-deployed engineer, sales engineer, solutions architect, technical account manager, or similar customer-facing engineering role.
Strong hands-on engineering skills—comfortable reading an unfamiliar Python or JavaScript/Node service, finding the bug, and writing the patch.
Working fluency with real-time and streaming protocols, including WebSockets, audio pipelines, and latency budgets.
Track record of carrying a number—net new customers, activation rate, expansion ARR, or similar—and consistently hitting it.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills. You’ll be the primary face of AssemblyAI in hundreds of customer Slack channels, email threads, and in-person or virtual meetings concurrently.
Aggressive use of AI tooling in your own workflow (Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, custom agents); bonus if you’ve built or shipped your own.
High sense of urgency and ownership, with the ability to manage multiple concurrent deals and context-switch frequently.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience with voice AI, ASR, speech-to-text, telephony, or audio infrastructure is a plus.

Responsibilities

Own a portfolio of in-flight leads across AssemblyAI’s product lines, driving them from first API call to consistent production usage against a quarterly new-customer goal.
Reach out proactively the moment a developer’s usage ramps, diagnosing what’s blocking them from scaling and removing it before they go quiet.
Read unfamiliar customer codebases quickly and ship working patches alongside their engineers, debugging real-time audio, WebSocket, and latency issues directly in their service.
Tune model configurations for each use case—end-of-turn detection, keyterms, language coverage, async vs. real-time—and translate the tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike.
Run discovery and architecture conversations about customer use cases, knowing when to push back and when to lean in.
Steward technical wins through to commercial close: DPAs, MSAs, security reviews, stakeholder mapping, and multi-threading the buying team.
Hand off graduated accounts cleanly with the context and written history required for a smooth transition.
Aggregate lead feedback into structured signals for Product and Engineering, making sure the self-serve experience improves measurably because of the patterns you surface.
Build internal tooling—agents, dashboard, AI workflows—that help the team operate ahead of the wave as lead volume grows.