Principal Software Engineer
•Skimmer· 1d
💻 Engineering⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal🇺🇸 USA
1d ago
Deepgram·1 day ago
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.
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.
Deepgram wins when developers can go from API key to production with as little friction as possible. As a Staff Developer Experience Engineer, you’ll own the systems that make that happen—from our SDK architecture and code-generation pipeline to the tooling, documentation, and integrations developers rely on every day.
This is a deeply technical engineering role, not a traditional Developer Relations position. You’ll build and evolve the foundation behind our multi-language SDKs, improve the developer journey across every touchpoint, and remove friction before developers ever encounter it. Working closely with Engineering, Product, Partnerships, and Developer Relations, you’ll help define the standards for developer experience across the platform.
Success in this role means making Deepgram the easiest voice AI platform to build on: faster time to first API call, better SDKs, fewer support issues, and an experience that developers genuinely enjoy using.
Real-time, streaming SDKs. Our SDKs wrap low-latency WebSocket APIs for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and Voice Agents. The hard, interesting parts are streaming, partial and interim results, reconnection and backpressure, and concurrency.
Multiple languages and tech stacks. Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, Rust, .NET, and Java today, with a persistent eye on what developers are building with.
Open source, in the open. The SDKs are public on GitHub. You own the repos, work in the open, and engage directly with external contributors, issues, and PRs.
Spec-driven, generated SDKs. The libraries are generated from a shared API specification, so much of the craft lives in the generation pipeline and templates rather than hand-writing each library, which is exactly the architecture this role owns.
The wider surface. A CLI, the documentation and reference experience, and starter repos and reference integrations for the partner stacks developers build voice agents on, like Pipecat, LiveKit, AWS, and Twilio.
Own the direction of developer experience. Set the DX roadmap (what we build, in what order, and why) and act as the technical lead for the area without direct reports. You're the person Product, Engineering, and Partnerships come to for the DX point of view, and the one who represents it in planning.
Own the SDK code-generation architecture. Design and own the system that produces our SDKs, so every supported library ships predictably and adding a new language is a known, low-cost effort rather than a one-off project.
Set the standard for how developers experience the platform. Define the quality bar, cross-language parity, versioning and release discipline, and observability across all of our SDKs. These are the standards the rest of the team builds against.
Raise the level of everyone who touches the SDK surface. Through code review, patterns, documentation, and pairing, you make the engineers around you better at developer experience, leading through influence rather than management.
Attack friction at the root. Find the systemic causes that slow developers down across whole segments and fix them once, structurally, before developers ever hit them.
Build the tooling the whole team relies on. The code-generation pipeline, CI and supporting infrastructure, starter repositories, and context that both human developers and AI coding agents can build on (including emerging standards like llms.txt).
Design for resilience and longevity. Build documentation, automation, and architecture that the whole team can operate and extend, so the work lasts and scales beyond any one person.
Be the technical voice into Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Partnerships. Give cross-functional stakeholders the context and technical input they need to make good decisions about the developer-facing surface across our partner ecosystem.
A track record of owning developer-facing tooling across multiple languages. Starts with libraries, and expands to the SDK generators, templates, and release automation that produce them, with direction others built against.
AI as part of how you build. You use AI as real infrastructure in your workflow. Think agentic pipelines, custom tooling, and generators you've authored and rely on daily, with strong verification discipline. (Be ready to talk about the most complex AI system you've built recently.)
An instinct to build reusable systems. Your standout work is something that outlived you. It could be a generator, automation, pipeline, or architecture that others adopted.
First-principles reasoning about systems. You think about SDKs, code generation, and partner ecosystems as systems. They have inputs, outputs, feedback loops, and boundaries.
Production ownership instincts. You treat production SDKs as production: observability, incident response, backward-compatibility discipline, and a bias toward removing recurring toil.
Range beyond your core. You go deep on developer experience and tooling, and you can pick up developer content, demos, or community work when the moment calls for it.
You think in developer outcomes, not just shipped code: you connect SDK and docs work to product activation and retention.
You set the standards for our SDKs and developer tooling, and the rest of the team adopts them.
The team has a clear direction for developer experience, and follows it, because you set it; and the engineers around you get better at DX because of how you work.
You're a recognized authority on developer experience; engineers and partners reference your work at the integration layer.
More signups reach a successful first call, and fewer drop at integration, because the SDKs and docs make activation effortless.
Support load drops, because the tooling and documentation answer the question first.
The hardest, least-defined problems in our developer experience get named and solved, often before anyone else has spotted them.
Deepgram wins when developers move from "is this possible?" to "this is in production" with zero friction. For almost every developer, that path runs through an SDK: it's where a new signup either makes a successful first call or quietly drops, which makes it one of the highest-leverage activation points in our product-led growth funnel. As a Staff Developer Experience Engineer, you own that surface and the architecture behind it: you don't just tell developers what's possible, you build the path that makes it effortless.