Senior Data Scientist, Audio

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. Deepgram is looking for a Data Scientist to sit at the intersection between research and data: people who think deeply about what conversational data is actually composed of, what makes data valuable, and how to best leverage that. Conversational audio presents incredibly rich scientific, engineering, and infrastructure challenges that are orders of magnitude harder than working with text. Speech carries speakers, accents, dialects, emotion, overlapping talk, code-switching, domain vocabulary, and acoustic conditions that range from a quiet studio to a drive-through — all with rich context that moves the conversation. In this role you’ll collaborate closely with our research, engineering, and data teams to answer those questions rigorously and at scale. You’ll care deeply about what makes conversational data difficult, you’ll characterize it, and you’ll shape the strategies that turn it into model gains. This role rewards conviction, creativity in approach, and a real appetite for overturning your own assumptions when the data says otherwise. This is a hands-on, high-leverage role with unusual latitude to define an area from first principles. It reports to the VP of Data Operations. We’re looking for people who: • See “we’ve always done it this way” as a starting position to argue with, not a constraint to work around • Can find the one experiment that settles a question in days rather than months • Are creative about where signal hides — in metadata, in model confidence, in the failures • Have the vision to take a scrappy proof-of-concept and scale it 100x • Are obsessed with using AI to automate and amplify their own impact What You’ll Own • Understand and characterize our data. Build the analysis that tells us what we actually have — languages, conditions, domains, speakers, quality — and what’s underrepresented. • Design and build active-learning loops. Decide what’s worth working on next based on where it will move performance, and make that decision systematic rather than intuitive. • Think deeply about how to best leverage humans in the loop. Human attention is the scarcest input in this system. Design the workflows, tooling, and model-assisted steps that make it count. • Make representative benchmarking possible. Build the curated datasets and methodology that let us make honest claims about model quality across the full diversity of real-world speech.Senior • Change our minds about what data strategies actually work. Run the experiments that separate what works from what everyone assumes works. • Care about data consistency, cleanliness, and organization — and about making data legible and accessible to non-technical teams, not just to the people who built the pipelines. • Bring method and automation to model adaptation. Turn one-off, domain- and customer-specific model work into repeatable, documented pipelines. What We’re Looking For • Hands-on work on real data pipelines and model-facing problems in data science, ML, or applied research • Strong Python and data tooling; comfort building analysis, scoring, and automation yourself • Experience with data characterization, data selection, active learning, or similar “what should we work on next” problems • Working familiarity with speech/audio or NLP models — you can reason about model output quality, confidence, and error modes • A track record of turning ambiguous, messy data situations into measurable model or product improvements • You build systems others run without you in the room — a reusable harness, not a one-off notebook • Strong communication skills, especially translating complex findings for audiences who don’t share your background • An active AI-tool user. Not aspirational — tell us what you use and what you’ve built with it It would be great if you also had: • Direct experience with ASR/TTS, audio data, or multilingual/code-switched data. • Experience with ensemble labeling, pseudo-labeling, or LLM-assisted annotation. • Familiarity with data provenance, PII/GDPR-aware pipelines, or model-improvement compliance. • Experience building custom or fine-tuned models for specific customers or domains. • Comfort working directly with research and engineering teams on shared infrastructure. Backed by prominent investors including Y Combinator, Madrona, Tiger Global, Wing VC and NVIDIA, Deepgram has raised over $215M in total funding. If you’re looking to work on cutting-edge technology and make a significant impact in the AI industry, we’d love to hear from you! Deepgram is an equal opportunity employer. We want all voices and perspectives represented in our workforce. We are a curious bunch focused on collaboration and doing the right thing. We put our customers first, grow together and move quickly. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, pregnancy, parental status, genetic information, political affiliation, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. We are happy to provide accommodations for applicants who need them. 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].