Job description
Forward Deployed Engineer (Audio & Voice AI)
Company Overview
Voice is becoming the primary interface for technology. For the first time in history, we can use natural language to control and interact with our devices, services, and applications, and we’re only at the beginning of the adoption of Voice and Physical AI across industries. Current voice interactions, however, still lack a fundamental human skill: nuanced understanding of audio scenes and environments. Navigating complex auditory scenes, distinguishing between multiple voices, or focusing on a main speaker are all part of the challenge of “teaching machines to hear like human beings.”
At ai-coustics, we’re building the audio intelligence layer and developer tooling to enable more robust and intelligent voice agents and Physical AI applications. Today, Voice AI companies like Perplexity, Retell, LiveKit or AssemblyAI use the ai-coustics SDK to prepare their agents for real-world acoustic challenges. Our models power thousands of agents worldwide and process millions of hours each month.
We are backed by leading early-stage investors including Connect Ventures, Partech, Inovia Capital, as well as angel investors from HuggingFace, DeepMind and Amazon with deep expertise in AI and developer infrastructure. These partners share our vision and are helping us build a world-class team operating with high levels of responsibility and velocity. We look for people who take ownership, think systemically, and want to solve challenging real-world problems in close collaboration with our customers. If you’re motivated by developing technology that is used in production, shaping an emerging category and setting a new standard for how Voice AI works in the real world, you’ll feel at home at ai-coustics.
Role Overview
We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to own the technical journey of our customers and partners, from understanding their problems and proving the value of our technology to integrating it successfully in production. Sitting between GTM, Product Engineering, and R&D, you will be the technical authority in customer engagements and turn what you learn in the field into product and research input. This is not a role for someone executing an established playbook: you will help create it, operate strategically, and remain deeply hands-on. Speed of response matters here, since a blocked customer is one we can lose. The role is on-site in Berlin.
Tasks
- Drive customer deployments: Run technical discovery, agree on evaluation and deployment plans, and keep customers and internal teams aligned through production rollout.
- Demonstrate value: Design and run rigorous evaluations using representative datasets, meaningful baselines and metrics. Turn the results into compelling benchmarks, demos and qualitative examples for engineers and decision-makers.
- Get customers into production: Move fast. Integrate and configure our technology inside customer Voice AI stacks; write code, debug real-time audio pipelines, validate latency and compute constraints, and resolve SDK issues that block rollout.
- Build a scalable technical GTM engine: Over time, turn recurring customer work into standardized workflows, tools, reference implementations and documentation so we can evaluate and deploy with more customers without increasing effort linearly.
- Shape the product from the field: Understand customer problems and identify recurring failure modes, integration friction and unmet needs. Reproduce and structure them into actionable input for Product Engineering and R&D.
- Support technical communication: Contribute to case studies, product education, technical content, talks, or product launches.
Requirements
- 3+ years of full-time experience in a technically demanding engineering role, with evidence that you have independently owned complex projects from an ambiguous starting point through a real-world outcome.
- Hands-on experience with audio, speech, Voice AI, audio DSP, or a closely related field. You can reason deeply about audio systems, evaluation data, model behavior, and the way these affect downstream applications.
- A master’s degree in a STEM field, such as computer science, mathematics, engineering, physics, or a related quantitative discipline.
- Excellent communication. You can earn the trust of highly technical engineers, explain complex findings to non-specialists, ask incisive questions, and communicate an uncomfortable technical conclusion clearly when necessary.
- Understanding of production ML systems. You can reason about inference, latency, CPU and memory use, concurrency, streaming state, reliability, and the practical constraints of deploying models in real-time applications.
- Solid engineering skills. You can quickly understand unfamiliar systems, write clean and reliable code, and build tools and experiments that others can reproduce. Python is required; Rust is a plus.
- Excellent command of agentic engineering workflows. Coding agents and AI tools are a core part of how you work. You use them to move substantially faster without outsourcing your technical judgment or attention to detail.
- A product mindset. You look beyond the immediate request, recognize recurring patterns, and distinguish between a customer-specific workaround and an opportunity to improve the product for everyone.
- A high-agency startup mindset. You are proactive, comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities, and willing to do whatever technically credible work is needed to move an important customer or partnership forward.
Benefits
- Opportunity to work at a rapidly growing Voice AI startup, backed by top investors.
- Compensation and equity: Competitive salary package, additional benefits and stock options, enabling you to take part in the company’s success.
- Startup Culture: Dynamic, fast-paced environment with passionate and collaborative colleagues.
- High Impact: Groundbreaking startup at a pivotal growth stage, making a real difference in how people experience audio.
- Ownership & Autonomy: Take full ownership of projects and ship fast.
- Work With the Best: World-class team of engineers and builders with ample room for professional growth.
- Contribute to the Future: Define the landscape of Voice AI technology.
