About this role
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Company Overview
Deepgram is bringing the world’s most natural interface, voice, to the technology we use every day. Our speech models and real-time infrastructure power AI systems that keep up with the way people actually speak. More than 5,000 organizations run conversational voice AI on Deepgram in production, including Twilio, Cloudflare, Sierra, Decagon, Vapi, Cresta, Granola, and Jack in the Box.
The Deepgram Voice Agent Platform brings together speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech, with voice-native foundation models available through cloud APIs or self-hosted and on-premises deployments. Built for accuracy, low latency and cost efficiency, Deepgram makes high-quality voice experiences practical to build and run at scale. More than 650,000 developers have used Deepgram to process more than 200,000 years of audio. Every day, more of the world’s conversations with AI run on our models.
Operating Principles:
Deepgram is a research company that productizes as fast as possible. Four Operating Principles shape how we think, decide, and work together:
Compress before you communicate.You think it through first, then lead with the bottom line.
Resist entropy.You question what already exists before adding more process or tools.
Solve the category.You fix recurring problems at the source, not one case at a time.
Work at the frontier.You go after problems no one has solved yet.
We look for people who already work this way, and these principles shape how we grow and evaluate our team.
AI-First by Default
We build AI that millions of people talk to, and we run the company the same way. AI is how we centralize work here, and is core to how we operate.
That means more than using the tools. We expect you to:
Build, not just use. Design your own workflows and agents, and use AI to remove whole categories of work instead of doing the same work faster.
Own the output. AI can speed up the work. It doesn’t make anyone less accountable for it. You understand, verify, and stand behind everything you share, including what an agent produces for you.
Spend the time you get back at the frontier. The capacity AI creates goes toward problems no one has solved yet.
Keep pace. Models and tools change every month, and so will your work. You adopt what’s new quickly and drop what no longer earns its place.
We judge AI by what it helps you deliver and whether you stand behind the result, not by how often you use it. In interviews, expect to walk us through a workflow you built and where you drew the line between AI and your own judgment.
The Opportunity
Deepgram is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be the technical lead of the Console team.
Deepgram is the leader in developer-friendly building blocks for language AI: real-time transcription, voice agents, and audio intelligence at scale. The Console team owns the product surfaces that help developers discover, test, and adopt Deepgram. That includes customer-facing experiences like Console and Playground, account management (authorization, billing, analytics), agentic tooling integrations like MCP servers and SDK experiences, and internal tools that support teams across the company. These surfaces shape a customer's first impression of Deepgram and directly influence buying decisions.
In the current wave of AI-native development, developer experience is the product. The best infrastructure wins by being the easiest to trust.
As a Staff engineer, you'll set the technical direction for our self-serve platform and lead large, high-priority, cross-functional projects that shape the company's product-led growth. You'll partner with senior leaders in Engineering, Product, Design, Sales, and Marketing, help set priorities, and anticipate the problems we'll face before they arrive. You'll still write a lot of code. We're looking for a strong full-stack generalist with broad product instincts.
What You'll Do
Set the technical strategy and architecture for Console, Playground, account management services, and agentic developer tooling. Make sure today's decisions scale with our product-led growth plans.
Lead large, high-priority, cross-functional projects from ambiguous idea to launch. Drive the key technical decisions and keep stakeholders informed at major milestones.
Partner with senior leaders in Engineering, Product, Design, Sales, and Marketing on roadmap and company direction, especially for AI-native developer experience.
Set priorities with the engineering manager and product leadership, and translate them into clear, incrementally releasable work for the team.
Build and ship full-stack features yourself, including polished user interfaces and the APIs and backend services behind them.
Drive the technical foundation of the self-serve growth engine: activation funnels, in-product upgrade flows, usage-based billing instrumentation, and PLG experimentation.
Shape how developers use Deepgram through AI tools, including MCP servers, SDK experiences, AI agent playgrounds, and LLM-powered developer tooling.
Spot recurring patterns in incidents, tech debt, and delivery problems. Surface root causes to leadership, anticipate future problems, and own the solutions.
Raise the engineering bar across the team through design reviews, code reviews, technical standards, and mentoring senior and mid-level engineers.
What We're Looking For
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping full-stack web applications used by customers.
Experience as a technical lead on large, cross-functional projects with significant business impact.
Strong front-end skills with modern web technologies and frameworks, and a strong command of web fundamentals, product quality, and user experience.
Solid backend experience in a language such as Python, Rust, Go, or similar, including designing APIs and services for customer-facing products.
Proven ability to drive architectural decisions that hold up as products and teams scale.
Experience partnering with senior leaders on strategy and prioritization, and influencing without authority.
A habit of finding root causes, anticipating problems, and turning them into durable solutions.
A consistent record of mentoring engineers and raising the bar on engineering practices.
Comfort with startup realities: building quickly, iterating often, and running experiments.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Nice to Have
Experience building AI-powered developer tooling such as playgrounds, SDK experiences, interactive docs, or evaluation UIs for ML models.
Experience shipping agentic or voice AI integrations, such as MCP servers, function-calling pipelines, or voice assistant SDKs.
Experience driving PLG at a developer-tools company, including activation experiments, usage-based pricing, and upgrade flows.
Experience with React, or interest in learning it.
Depth in backend systems: databases (Postgres), schema design, and performance optimization at scale.
Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containerized deployments, and hybrid cloud (bare-metal datacenters plus cloud providers).
Interest in Rust, LLM APIs, GPUs, and real-time audio systems, and a willingness to challenge common assumptions about where the technology is heading.
Notice: We're aware of individuals impersonating Deepgram recruiters. All legitimate Deepgram recruiting communication comes from an @deepgram.com email address. If you've received a message claiming to be Deepgram, please forward it to [email protected].
This is a remote role. Applicants must be located in: United States.
