Job description
Company Overview
Deepgram is the leading voice AI platform for developers building speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS) and full speech-to-speech (STS) offerings. 200,000+ developers build with Deepgram’s voice-native foundational models – accessed through APIs or as self-managed software – due to our unmatched accuracy, latency and pricing. Customers include software companies building voice products, co-sell partners working with large enterprises, and enterprises solving internal voice AI use cases. The company ended 2024 cash-flow positive with 400+ enterprise customers, 3.3x annual usage growth across the past 4 years, over 50,000 years of audio processed and over 1 trillion words transcribed. There is no organization in the world that understands voice better than Deepgram
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 currently looking for seasoned Data Scientists with demonstrated experience solving hard data problems while exploring research frontiers to join our Research Staff. Conversational audio presents incredibly rich scientific, engineering, and infrastructure challenges that are orders of magnitude harder than working with text. As a Member of the Research Staff, you will help us to build an industrial “data factory” that will be used to power the next generation of Voice AI systems - unlocking the creation of models that go beyond basic transcription and comprehension, capturing nuanced meanings in complex conversations, adapting robustly to diverse speech patterns, and generating empathic responses with human-like, contextualized speech. You will collaborate closely with our product, engineering, and data teams to build and deploy models in the most scalable voice API on the planet. We look forward to you bringing your expertise, sharing insights from your latest experiments, and collaborating with us to push the boundaries of AI and voice technology.
The Challenge
We are seeking Research Staff who:
See “unsolved” problems as opportunities to pioneer entirely new approaches
Can identify the one critical experiment that will validate or kill an idea in days, not months
Have the vision to scale successful proofs-of-concept 100x
Are obsessed with using AI to automate and amplify your own impact
If you find yourself energized rather than daunted by these expectations—if you’re already thinking about five ideas to try while reading this—you might be the researcher we need. This role demands obsession with the problems, creativity in approach, and relentless drive toward elegant, scalable solutions. The technical challenges are immense, but the potential impact is transformative.
What You’ll Do
Drive high performance data acquisition, preparation and synthesis pipelines to generate data for the next generation of speech and language AI foundation models
Develop advanced characterizations of complex conversational audio utilizing a diverse toolkit of signals processing techniques and deep learning models
Collaborate with DataOps and Engineering to create automated systems which scale the ability of human annotators to label high value data and provide critical feedback on model outputs
Build advanced benchmarking methodologies and curated datasets for evaluating conversational voice systems
Document and present results of data experiments and analysis for internal and external audiences
You’ll Love This Role If You
Are obsessed with making sense out of complex and/or messy data
Enjoy building from the ground up and love to create new systems from scratch
Are passionate about AI and interested in leveraging data to solve hard problems
Are motivated by the prospect of scaling yourself using automation and AI models
It’s Important to Us That You Have
Experience building data processing pipelines from a blank page and owning the entire data stack including data acquisition, characterization, cleaning, serving and transformation
Experience and expertise applying statistical methods and deep learning models to understand complex data
Strong communication skills and the ability to translate complex concepts in simple terms, depending on the target audience
Strong software engineering skills with particular emphasis on developing clean, modular code in Python and working with Pytorch
Nice to Haves
Background in Physics, Mechanical Engineering or Language Processing
Experience building models
Speech and audio experience
Backed by prominent investors including Y Combinator, Madrona, Tiger Global, Wing VC and NVIDIA, Deepgram has raised over $85 million in total funding. If you’re looking to work on cutting-edge technology and make a significant impact in the AI industry, we’d love to hear from you!
Deepgram is an equal opportunity employer. We want all voices and perspectives represented in our workforce. We are a curious bunch focused on collaboration and doing the right thing. We put our customers first, grow together and move quickly. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, pregnancy, parental status, genetic information, political affiliation, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate.
We are happy to provide accommodations for applicants who need them.
