Forward-Deployed Engineer, Strategic Accounts

About the Role

Deepgram is seeking Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs) for its strategic accounts. You will embed with one strategic customer at a time, working directly with their technical and business teams, alongside Deepgram's core research teams. Your role is to take Deepgram's voice AI platform the last mile, building production-scale integrations, voice agents, and the necessary tooling to ensure customer success.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and ship end-to-end services, integrations, internal tooling, or agent and prompt engineering solutions as required.
• Design, develop, and maintain production-scale integrations with customer third-party systems, such as point of sale, loyalty, payment gateways, and customer data platforms.
• Spend regular time on-site with customers, working directly with their technical and business teams.
• Monitor, debug, and optimize shipped solutions in production, including challenging audio environments.
• Collaborate with research and product teams to evolve the platform based on customer needs and field learnings.
• Test changes against live production data, measuring impact on accuracy, latency, and throughput.
• Contribute to solution scoping, shaping statements of work, and identifying expansion opportunities.
• Participate in internal collaboration for product feedback, knowledge sharing, and Applied Engineering strategy.

Time Allocation

• Embedded customer delivery (60-80%): Deployments, integrations, technical problem-solving, and developing reusable solutions and documentation.
• Scoping and expansion support (10-25%): Solution scoping, shaping statements of work, and identifying expansion opportunities.
• Internal collaboration (~15%): Product feedback, knowledge sharing, and contributing to Applied Engineering strategy.

On-Site Expectation

• Regular, recurring time with your customer, with on-site presence at least once or twice a month.
• On-site time may increase to as much as 80% during critical periods (launches, pilots).
• Maintain an in-office presence in either our San Francisco or New York City office.

Your First 90 Days

• First 30 Days: Complete accelerated Forward-Deployed onboarding, shadow active engagements, make your first customer site visit, and take ownership of your first workstream.
• 60 Days: Own a meaningful slice of your customer's solution, join the on-site rhythm, build relationships with the customer's technical team, and ship work that runs in production.
• 90 Days: Operate with independence, run your own on-site visits, own your slice end-to-end, bring field learnings back to the team, and join solution-scoping conversations.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrable experience.
• Hands-on experience developing and deploying backend systems that run in production.
• Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and API design.
• Proactive problem recognition and a focus on work impact.
• Experience with modern languages such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Go, or Kotlin.
• Experience with containerization tools like Docker and Kubernetes is a plus.

Qualifications for Customer-Facing Craft

• Relationship building: Enjoy getting to know colleagues and investing in relationships beyond immediate tasks.
• Reading the room: Ability to discern engagement levels, skepticism, and unspoken sentiment in meetings.
• Acting on observations: Proactively address opportunities or questions identified.
• Coachability: Appetite to learn and openness to feedback.

Would Be Great if You Had

• Experience working with audio or voice interfaces.
• Experience building and maintaining systems integrating with multiple third-party APIs, particularly point-of-sale systems.
• Experience taking a system from zero to one.
• Any experience as the technical person in front of a non-technical audience (teaching, tutoring, demos, hackathons, support).