Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE), Strategic Accounts

The Opportunity

Most engineering roles ask you to build the platform. This one asks you to build everything between the platform and a customer's success: the solutions, integrations, and tooling that run in production for some of the largest enterprises in the world.

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 (we already partner with several of the world's leading restaurant brands), and the examples in this posting come from that work.

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.

• 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

Your First 90 Days

• First 30 Days — Complete the accelerated Forward-Deployed onboarding in your first two weeks, covering Deepgram's technology, products, competitive landscape, and core APIs. The standard Applied Engineer ramp runs four to six weeks. Yours is faster because your pod is waiting. Then spend the back half of the month in motion:

  • Shadow your pod's active engagement

  • Make your first customer site visit alongside a senior Forward-Deployed Engineer

  • Take ownership of your first workstream (an integration, a tool, or a production issue), with your work reviewed before it ships

• 60 Days — Own a meaningful slice of your customer's solution:

  • Join the on-site rhythm and build relationships with your customer's technical team

  • Ship work that runs in production

• 90 Days — Operate with independence:

  • Run your own on-site visits and own your slice end to end

  • Bring what the field teaches you back to the team as product feedback and reusable building blocks

  • Join your first solution-scoping conversations with the pod

You'll Love This Role If You

• See yourself as an engineer first who happens to be great with customers, not the other way around

• Thrive in high-ambiguity environments where moving fast and making sound decisions under pressure are part of the job

• Enjoy embedding deeply with customers, building trust, and becoming their go-to technical partner

• Find satisfaction in shipping production systems and watching them run in the physical world (a drive-thru at rush hour is an honest test environment)

• Want to grow quickly, with high-stakes accounts, a steep learning curve, and a senior engineer reviewing your work

The software bar comes first. It's important to us that you have

• 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

And because you'll be in the room with customers, we look for the raw materials of customer-facing craft:

• 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.

It Would Be Great if You Had

• 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)