Research Engineer, Machine Learning Systems

COMPANY OVERVIEW Deepgram is the leading platform underpinning the emerging trillion-dollar Voice AI economy, providing real-time APIs for speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and building production-grade voice agents at scale. More than 200,000 developers and 1,300+ organizations build voice offerings that are ‘Powered by Deepgram’, including Twilio, Cloudflare, Sierra, Decagon, Vapi, Daily, Cresta, Granola, and Jack in the Box. Deepgram’s voice-native foundation models are accessed through cloud APIs or as self-hosted and on-premises software, with unmatched accuracy, low latency, and cost efficiency. Backed by a recent Series C led by leading global investors and strategic partners, Deepgram has processed over 50,000 years of audio and transcribed more than 1 trillion words. There is no organization in the world that understands voice better than Deepgram. 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 who works at Deepgram 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. THE OPPORTUNITY Voice is the most natural modality for human interaction with machines. However, current sequence modeling paradigms based on jointly scaling model and data cannot deliver voice AI capable of universal human interaction. The challenges are rooted in fundamental data problems posed by audio: real-world audio data is scarce and enormously diverse, spanning a vast space of voices, speaking styles, and acoustic conditions. Even if billions of hours of audio were accessible, its inherent high dimensionality creates computational and storage costs that make training and deployment prohibitively expensive at world scale. We believe that entirely new paradigms for audio AI are needed to overcome these challenges and make voice interaction accessible to everyone. THE ROLE Deepgram is seeking a highly skilled and versatile Machine Learning Engineer to join our Research team. As a Member of the Research Staff, you will partner with research scientists to prototype and validate novel modeling ideas, then scale them through robust training systems for speech technologies, internal tooling, and innovative data strategies. You'll work at the intersection of machine learning, data infrastructure, and internal tooling to support our mission of building world-class speech recognition and synthesis systems. On the Research team, you will experiment with new technologies and techniques, while also working on product-focused deliverables, learning from colleagues with a wide range of expertise in AI and machine learning as you go. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Scalable Model Training: Architect and manage horizontally scalable systems that dramatically accelerate the end-to-end training lifecycle for Speech-to-Text (STT) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models. This includes far more than automated training: the role focuses on making model development significantly faster and more efficient through optimized data preparation and management, high-throughput training pipelines, distributed infrastructure, and automated evaluation tooling. - Tooling & Accessibility: Design and implement internal UIs and tools that make ML systems