Remote Staff Conversational Designer, Voice AI

Deepgram; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Deepgram is seeking a Staff Conversational Designer to own persona, voice system, turn-taking, repair and pacing for its Voice Agent API. You will work closely with ML and Engineering on ASR/TTS behavior, latency budgets, and end-of-turn decisions, shipping production-grade conversational experiences for developers.

You’ll define design principles, evals, and reference experiences, and publish guidance to help customers build natural conversations at scale.

Qualifications

• Deep experience designing conversational behavior for LLM-based voice agents or assistants, not only scripted IVR flows.
• Fluent with the speech pipeline from ASR through LLM to TTS, and understanding where design decisions live inside it.
• Experience designing turn-taking, interruption, repair, and confirmation patterns that shipped and held up in production.
• Ability to measure quality with evals, transcripts, benchmarks, or a structured failure-analysis loop.
• Exceptional writing craft, including sample dialogs, design guidance, and documentation that others can build against.
• Experience influencing engineering and ML partners on behavior they own, without authority over them.
• Experience designing for developers or technical users, including APIs, SDKs, and documentation surfaces.
• A working AI practice, with a point of view on where these tools help and where they mislead.

Responsibilities

• 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-match and no-input handling, and confirmation strategy, including guardrails that require confirmation before high-stakes actions.
• Own latency-aware pacing and perceived responsiveness: brevity, backchanneling, hold and filler speech, all against real-time budgets.
• Establish conversational-quality evals and a transcript review practice that turns production failures into a repeatable design loop.
• Build the reference agent experiences and developer-facing design guidance that demonstrate best-practice conversation on the Voice Agent API.
• Partner with ML and Research on ASR and TTS behavior, and on the quality criteria that define a good conversation.
• Set the conversation-design principles, review standards, and shared vocabulary the broader team adopts.

Job description

Deepgram is seeking a Staff Conversational Designer to own persona, voice system, turn-taking, repair and pacing for its Voice Agent API. You will work closely with ML and Engineering on ASR/TTS behavior, latency budgets, and end-of-turn decisions, shipping production-grade conversational experiences for developers.

You’ll define design principles, evals, and reference experiences, and publish guidance to help customers build natural conversations at scale.