Staff Conversational Designer

• 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.
• Note: This is a remote role based in Pacific Time, with a preference for candidates located in San Francisco.
• 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.
• This is a leading edge role. Very few companies have a titled equivalent. You will be defining this discipline at Deepgram, not inheriting it.
• 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
• Believe conversation is an interface with real craft behind it, not a prompt someone tunes on the side
• Want the hard real-time problems: endpointing, barge-in, and the half-second you cannot design away
• Get energized by being foundational, defining what good means for a discipline that does not exist here yet
• Think the fastest way to raise quality is to make it measurable, then make it repeatable
• Are excited by a category still inventing its interaction patterns, where the work is invention rather than iteration
• We care more about expertise and leadership than years of experience.
• Deep experience designing conversational behavior for LLM-based voice agents or assistants, not only scripted IVR flows
• Real fluency with the speech pipeline, from ASR through LLM to TTS, and a working understanding of where design decisions actually live inside it
• A track record designing turn-taking, interruption, repair, and confirmation patterns that shipped and held up in production
• Evidence of building quality measurement into the practice: evals, transcript review, 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

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