Applied ML Engineer - Edge Devices

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. About the role Deepgram's speech models are among the fastest and most accurate in the world, and today we run them at scale on NVIDIA GPUs. Our customers increasingly need those same models on hardware we don't control: non-NVIDIA accelerators, edge servers, and embedded platforms with their own inference runtimes, operator sets, and constraints. Getting Deepgram models onto those platforms, with as few changes to the model as possible and no changes to the hardware paradigm, is the job. As an Applied ML Engineer on the Partner Platform Engineering team, you sit one layer above the metal. You take a Deepgram model as it exists today and adapt it to run correctly and efficiently within a target platform's existing kernel and runtime paradigm: swapping or reshaping operators, adjusting architecture parameters, choosing quantization and precision schemes, and validating accuracy and latency on the real device. Where a standard kernel isn't enough, you work with our Embedded AI Engineers, who write the custom kernels, and fit the model to what they build. You also own the deployment process that gets those adapted models onto edge targets repeatably. This is not a research role and not a cloud-serving role. It is applied ML for edge deployment. It is a great fit for a senior engineer who has already shipped models to non-GPU or edge hardware and wants to do it across many platforms, or a staff-level engineer who wants to define how Deepgram ports speech models to new hardware. We'll set the level to your experience. What you'll do • Port Deepgram speech models to non-NVIDIA and edge platforms, adapting model structure and parameters so they run within the target's existing operator set, runtime, and kernels with minimal modification. • Own serving-side model decisions for edge targets: quantization and precision choices, operator substitution, graph rewrites, and architecture tweaks that fit a model to