Staff Conversational Designer (Voice AI)

Location: Remote, based in Pacific Time, with a preference for candidates located in San Francisco, CA

Salary: $180,000–$240,000 annual base salary, plus equity and bonus

Company

Deepgram provides real-time speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and voice-agent APIs and software for developers and organizations building production voice applications.

What you will do

• Define and maintain persona and voice systems for Deepgram voice agents across experiences and use cases.
• Design turn-taking, endpointing, barge-in, interruption, repair, no-match, no-input, and confirmation behavior with ML and Engineering.
• Design latency-aware pacing, including brevity, backchanneling, hold speech, and filler speech within real-time budgets.
• Establish conversational-quality evaluations, transcript review, benchmarks, and repeatable failure-analysis practices.
• Build reference agent experiences and developer-facing guidance for natural conversations on the Voice Agent API.
• Set conversation-design principles, review standards, and shared terminology while partnering with ML, Research, Engineering, and Product Design.

Requirements

• Deep experience designing conversational behavior for LLM-based voice agents or assistants in production.
• Strong understanding of the speech pipeline from ASR through LLM to TTS and how design decisions affect it.
• Experience shipping turn-taking, interruption, repair, and confirmation patterns.
• Experience building quality measurement practices such as evaluations, transcript review, benchmarks, or structured failure analysis.
• Exceptional writing and documentation skills, including sample dialogs and guidance for technical users.
• Experience influencing Engineering and ML partners, designing for APIs, SDKs, and documentation surfaces, and applying AI tools effectively.

Nice to have

• Experience with a named assistant or production voice-agent platform.
• Practice with Wizard of Oz testing, sample-dialog methods, or LLM and voice-quality evaluation tooling.
• Experience in high-stakes or regulated conversation domains.
• Multilingual or cross-locale conversation-design experience.
• Background in high-growth B2B companies serving self-serve and enterprise customers.

Culture & Benefits

• AI-first environment where team members actively use and experiment with advanced AI tools.
• Fast-changing work focused on experimentation, adaptation, and continuous learning.
• Staff individual-contributor role reporting to the Director of Product Design.
• Compensation includes base salary, equity, and bonus.