Software Engineer - Applied AI (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA, United States; onsite

Salary: $173.8K–$212.4K annually, plus equity and a 10% bonus

Company

Deepgram provides real-time APIs and self-hosted or on-premises software for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and production voice agents.

What you will do

• Ship production features for live voice agent products, including drive-thru and phone ordering.
• Own customer problems end to end by identifying root causes and delivering fixes to production.
• Build reusable agent modules for ordering, reservations, and faster customer launches.
• Improve agent accuracy on real-world menus and catalogs while keeping structured data consistent across locations.
• Contribute to model fine-tuning and adaptation for customer-specific vocabulary and domains.
• Run experiments, identify product problems proactively, and evaluate whether new functionality improves customer outcomes.

Requirements

• Experience building and shipping production backend services in the cloud.
• Use modern AI coding tools as the default way of working without lowering the quality bar.
• Ability to learn quickly, work across unfamiliar parts of the stack, and take ownership from idea to production.
• Proactive problem-solving, clear communication, and comfort working directly with customers.
• Strong focus on customer outcomes, quality, and avoiding over-engineering.
• Comfort working across languages; the stack is mainly Kotlin and Python, with TypeScript on the front end.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or adapting models through work, research, or substantial projects.
• Experience building evaluation or scoring systems for models or agents.
• Experience with audio, speech-to-text, or text-to-speech.
• Founder or early-stage startup engineering experience, or experience taking a system from zero to one.
• Typically 2+ years of engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated experience.

Culture & Benefits

• AI-first operating model requiring active use and experimentation with advanced AI tools.
• Fast-changing environment focused on experimentation, adaptation, and continuous learning.
• Small Applied AI team working in person in San Francisco and staying close to enterprise customers and technology partners.
• Equity and a 10% bonus are offered in addition to salary.

Hiring process

• Legitimate recruiting communication comes only from an @_deepgram.com email address.