Staff Sales Engineer - Voice AI at Deepgram in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a high-impact, high-visibility Staff-level role at one of the most technically credible companies in the conversational AI space. Deepgram processes over 200,000 years of audio and counts Twilio and Cloudflare as customers — this is production-scale AI, not vaporware.
Compensation context: No salary is listed, but Staff Sales Engineers at AI infrastructure companies in the US typically earn $180k–$250k OTE (base + variable), with quota-carrying SEs skewing toward the higher end. Deepgram's Series B/C growth stage suggests equity upside is meaningful but less certain than a Series A bet.
Skills you'll build:
- Deep expertise in voice AI infrastructure (STT, TTS, real-time streaming) — a niche that is growing extremely fast
- Enterprise sales motion mastery: discovery, POC ownership, multi-stakeholder navigation
- Hands-on fluency with LLM orchestration, SIP/WebRTC telephony, and CCaaS integrations — rare and highly marketable
- Product influence: your field patterns feed directly into API and SDK roadmaps
Green flags: Clear operating principles, AI-native culture, quota ownership signals career progression toward SE leadership or product roles, and the voice AI market is early enough that this experience will compound significantly over the next 3–5 years.
Yellow flags: No explicit mention of benefits, PTO policy, or team size. The "AI-first by default" language sets a high bar for adaptability. Quota pressure on a nascent product category (Voice Agent) means pipeline building will require missionary selling in year one.
Ideal for a solutions engineer ready to step into a category-defining role at the intersection of AI, voice, and enterprise sales.
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:
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
Enterprises are moving fast from transcribing conversations to automating them. Contact centers, healthcare, financial services and consumer brands are putting voice agents in front of their customers. The buyers range from CX leaders to platform engineers, and the deals turn on latency, reliability, cost per minute and whether the agent holds up in production.
Deepgram is hiring a Staff Sales Engineer, Voice Agent to drive adoption of our Voice Agent platform globally. You'll work alongside every Account Executive on the team as the technical lead on voice agent deals, and you'll carry a quota for new Voice Agent logos and ARR. Most of your time is spent in front of customers: positioning Deepgram in discovery, winning the technical evaluation and getting customers to production. You report to the VP of Sales.
What You'll Do
Win voice agent deals. Lead discovery, technical qualification, architecture and proofs of concept for Voice Agent opportunities, and own the technical win from first call through production.
Be the expert in the room. Whiteboard how a customer's telephony stack (SIP trunks, PBX, CCaaS) connects to their voice agents and where Deepgram fits. Go deep on latency, turn-taking, interruption handling, function calling, cost per minute and build vs. buy.
Build what sells. Ship demos, reference agents and integration patterns across LLMs, telephony/SIP, CCaaS platforms and orchestration frameworks that AEs and customers can use on day one.
Carry the number. Own a quota tied to Voice Agent growth and run your pipeline and forecast with discipline.
Make the team better. Create the positioning, competitive battlecards, objection handling and enablement that let every AE sell Voice Agent with confidence, even when you are not on the call.
Bring the field into Product. Turn patterns from deals into clear, evidence-backed requirements for our API, SDKs and docs.
Work the ecosystem. Partner with CCaaS, telephony and LLM partners to build joint solutions and co-sell plays.
What You Bring
7+ years in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions engineering, sales engineering, solutions architecture or forward-deployed engineering, ideally at an API, CPaaS, CCaaS or conversational AI company.
Hands-on voice agent experience across the stack: telephony (SIP, WebRTC, PBX or CCaaS integration), orchestration (LLM agent frameworks, tool calling, real-time streaming pipelines) and models (STT, TTS, LLMs).
You build. You've shipped demos, POCs or production integrations in Python, Node.js or similar, and you can show us something you've built.
A track record in revenue-tied roles. You've been measured on technical wins, pipeline or quota, and you consistently hit your targets.
Comfort leading complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals with everyone from platform engineers to CX executives.
Clear communication. You can walk an engineer through a SIP call flow and a VP through a cost-per-minute business case in the same meeting.
Nice to Have
Voice agents built on frameworks or platforms like Pipecat, LiveKit, Vapi, Retell or OpenAI Realtime
Contact center domain experience (Genesys, NICE, Five9, Amazon Connect, Talkdesk or similar)
Experience carrying an individual or overlay quota
Hands-on work with MCP servers, agent harnesses or CLI tools, or open-source contributions with real adoption
Familiarity with Challenger or a similar sales methodology
Experience selling across both self-serve and enterprise motions
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].
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Sales Engineer role fully remote?
Does the Staff Sales Engineer carry a quota?
What technical background is required to apply?
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