Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE), Strategic Accounts

About the Role

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. This role focuses on building everything between the platform and a customer's success: solutions, integrations, and tooling that run in production for some of the largest enterprises in the world.

As a Forward-Deployed Engineer, you'll take Deepgram's voice AI platform the last mile, including production-scale integrations with systems like point of sale, loyalty, payment gateways, and customer data platforms. You'll also develop voice agents that handle live customer interactions, along with the tooling, prompt engineering, and evaluation work that bridges Deepgram's current offerings and customer success.

Forward-deployed means working 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 anticipate problems before they escalate. When your customer needs a capability the platform doesn't yet offer, you'll prove what it should do next, and your fieldwork will shape Deepgram's future offerings.

About Forward-Deployed Engineering

Forward-Deployed Engineering is how Deepgram embeds with its most strategic accounts. You'll fully deploy into a dedicated account pod—a small, cross-functional team built around one strategic customer—for a defined stretch. While deployed, your pod's account is your only assignment, with no time split across other accounts or teams. Your work directly shapes how some of the world's largest brands implement voice AI.

Forward-Deployed Engineers are part of Deepgram's broader Applied Engineering team, which serves as the technical interface between Deepgram and our customers across their entire journey. Applied Engineering combines roles typically split into Forward-Deployed Engineering, Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Implementation, and Technical Support. This team is your home base and growth path, with a single ladder from Associate to Principal.

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 third-party systems your customer runs on (e.g., 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 challenging audio environments (e.g., noisy, multi-mic, drive-thru).
• Work with research and product teams to push the platform where your customer needs it to go, feeding field learnings back into the product.
• Test changes against live production data and measure their impact on accuracy, latency, and throughput.

Time Allocation

• Embedded customer delivery (60-80%): Deployments, integrations, and technical problem-solving with your account, plus turning field learnings into reusable solutions, automation, and documentation. Time allocation varies based on the engagement cycle.
• Scoping and expansion support (10-25%): Joining detailed solution scoping, shaping statements of work, and surfacing expansion opportunities from within the account. Pre-sales work (discovery, demos) is typically handled by a pre-sales Applied Engineer in your pod, but you may take on parts of this as needed.
• Internal collaboration (~15%): Product feedback, knowledge sharing, and contributing to Applied Engineering strategy.

On-Site Expectation

You'll have regular, recurring time with your customer, with on-site visits at least once or twice a month. During peak engagement periods (e.g., launches, critical integrations, high-stakes pilots), on-site time may increase to as much as 80%. Between these stretches, most of your time will focus on building, integrating, debugging, and shipping solutions.

Your First 90 Days

• First 30 Days:
  • Complete accelerated Forward-Deployed onboarding (2 weeks), covering Deepgram's technology, products, competitive landscape, and core APIs.
  • Shadow your pod's active engagement and make your first customer site visit alongside a senior Forward-Deployed Engineer.
  • Take ownership of your first workstream (e.g., an integration, tool, or 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 their technical team.
  • Ship work that runs in production.
• 90 Days:
  • Operate with independence: run your own on-site visits, own your slice of the solution end-to-end, and bring field learnings back to the team as product feedback and reusable building blocks.
  • Join your first solution-scoping conversations with the pod.

What You'll Enjoy

• You see yourself as an engineer first who happens to be great with customers, not the other way around.
• You thrive in high-ambiguity environments where moving fast and making sound decisions under pressure are part of the job.
• You enjoy embedding deeply with customers, building trust, and becoming their go-to technical partner.
• You find satisfaction in shipping production systems and watching them run in the physical world (e.g., a drive-thru at rush hour).
• You want to grow quickly, with high-stakes accounts, a steep learning curve, and a senior engineer reviewing your work.

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, early industry experience, or shipped projects.
• Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and API design.
• The instinct to proactively recognize problems and care about the impact of your work.

Customer-Facing Skills

• Relationship building: You genuinely enjoy getting to know the people you work with and invest in those relationships beyond immediate tasks.
• 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 you can solve or a question behind the question—you take action.
• Coachability: You're open to learning and feedback, with an appetite to refine your craft.

Preferred Skills

• Experience working with audio or voice interfaces.
• Experience building and maintaining systems that integrate with many third-party APIs, particularly point-of-sale systems.
• Experience taking a system from zero to one.
• Proficiency in one or more modern languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Rust, Go, Kotlin) and the flexibility to pick up new ones.
• Experience with containerization tools, such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Any experience being the technical person in front of a non-technical audience (e.g., teaching, tutoring, demos, hackathons, support).

Company Operating Rhythm

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 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. This may not be the right role if you’re not excited to experiment, adapt, think on your feet, and learn constantly, or if you’re seeking something highly prescriptive with a traditional 9-to-5.