Staff Product Designer, Conversational AI

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.

Note: This is a remote role based in Pacific Time, with a preference for candidates located in San Francisco.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Deepgram builds the models and APIs that put voice agents into production at scale. What decides whether those agents feel human is not a screen. It is whether the agent knows when you have finished speaking, what it does when you cut it off, how it recovers from a misheard word, how it confirms something consequential before acting, and how it covers the milliseconds it cannot remove.

Today those decisions live inside prompts and pipeline config, made ad hoc by whoever is closest to the problem. No one owns them end to end. We are hiring a Staff Conversational Designer to own them.

You will define how Deepgram's voice agents converse: persona, turn-taking, repair, confirmation, and pacing. You will work directly with ML and Engineering on the tradeoffs that make those behaviors real, including endpointing, barge-in, and latency budgets. You will build the evals that tell us whether a conversation is actually good, and publish the guidance and reference experiences that show developers how to build natural conversations on the Voice Agent API.

This is a leading edge role. Very few companies have a titled equivalent. You will be defining this discipline at Deepgram, not inheriting it.

You'll report directly to the Director of Product Design. This is a Staff IC role, and your impact shows up mostly in the leverage you create for others: the patterns our own experiences run on, and the guidance our customers build against.

Your first chapter: a documented persona and voice system, and turn-taking and repair behavior designed and shipped with Engineering. From there, scope expands into conversational-quality evals and developer-facing guidance.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Define the persona and voice system for Deepgram voice agents, and keep it coherent across experiences and use cases

- Design turn-taking, barge-in, and end-of-turn behavior with ML and Engineering, tuning responsiveness against the risk of interrupting the user, per use case

- Design conversational repair, no-ma …