Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE), Strategic Accounts
You’d embed with one strategic account and ship the voice system their team runs in production. Today those accounts are restaurant brands and restaurant technology partners.
- San Francisco or New York office, plus customer visits
- Full time
- One account at a time
- $155K to $193K, plus equity and a 10% annual bonus
This job is open.
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Jack’s take. Jack is an AI agent who gets to know what you’re great at, then finds your next job and helps you land it.
“This is a builder’s job. You’d be on site at least once or twice a month, and a launch can take that to 80% of your time.”
Who it suits
A good fit
- see yourself as an engineer who works well with customers
- like shipping voice that has to work in a noisy drive-thru
- are willing to be on site with a customer at least once or twice a month
Think twice
- want to stay off customer sites
- haven’t shipped a backend system to production
- want discovery and demos to be the whole job
What you’d do
- Build and ship the integration, the voice agent, and the prompts the account needs.
- Keep those integrations running on the systems the customer already uses, including point of sale, loyalty, and payments.
- Work on site with the customer’s technical and business teams.
- Measure whether a change moves accuracy, latency, and throughput, and feed that back to the product.
What they ask for
- You have a computer science, engineering, or related degree, or a record of building that stands in for one.
- You’ve developed and deployed backend systems that run in production.
- You’ve worked with cloud infrastructure and API design.
- You want the software work first, and the customer work with it.
How it works
- About 60% to 80% of the time is delivery for the account. Scoping is about 10% to 25%, and it shrinks when delivery peaks.
- You’d keep an in-office presence in San Francisco or New York.
- A senior forward-deployed engineer reviews your work before it ships.
- You’d join as an applied engineer, on a ladder from associate through principal.
- The hours aren’t a 9-to-5, and the work includes using AI tools day to day.
What to know about this job
Open 11 weeks
- Week 11This job has been open this long
- Week 12Half of San Francisco FDE jobs have closed
In November 2026, Deepgram had 3 forward deployed engineer jobs open, in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C.
The builder, the most common kind of FDE in San Francisco
- 56%The builder (this job). This kind ships production code into the customer’s systems, including integrations, data pipelines, and agents.
- 40%The deployment lead. Scopes the customer’s problem, runs the rollout and makes sure the product delivers what was promised.
Shares of open FDE jobs in San Francisco.
Most new San Francisco forward deployed engineers weren’t forward deployed engineers before
- 90% of people who became forward deployed engineers in San Francisco weren’t forward deployed engineers in their last job.
- 46% of them came from a startup or scale-up.
Deepgram lists $155K to $193K, plus equity and a 10% annual bonus for this job
The San Francisco forward deployed engineer guide shows what forward deployed engineers in San Francisco expect to earn.
What San Francisco forward deployed engineers earnWorth asking the hiring team
- “Which accounts are in the Bay Area, and which need travel?”
- “How often has on-site time actually reached 80%?”
Jack’s take on Deepgram
- It finished 2024 cash-flow positive
- Its Series C in January 2026 valued it at $1.3B
- LinkedIn lists 387 people
- Its cofounder still runs it, with leaders hired from IBM, AWS and Daily
- Based in San Francisco and remote
- Founded 2015
- 66 open jobs
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About this page
Jack & Jill isn’t Deepgram’s recruiter. We summarized this job from Deepgram’s public careers page, where you can apply. We check whether it’s still open each time you open this page. The market numbers come from our San Francisco forward deployed engineer guide and the company facts from Deepgram’s page. We last checked this summary against the posting on November 9, 2026. Jack’s take is Jack & Jill’s own.