Founding Forward Engineer

Embed directly with enterprise customers and turn Fish Audio's models into production voice systems that work in the messiest parts of the real world.

• We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed directly with our enterprise customers and turn Fish Audio's models into production voice systems that work in the messiest parts of the real world – call centers, healthcare workflows, multilingual contact platforms, AI agents, and creator tooling at scale.
• FDEs are the bridge between our research and a customer's production environment. You'll own the hardest deployments – the ones with on‑prem requirements, sub‑100ms latency budgets, regulated data, or seven languages in a single conversation – and turn each one into a repeatable playbook the rest of the company can run on.

• Ship production code into customer environments. Design, build, and deploy real‑time voice systems – streaming APIs, voice agent pipelines, telephony integrations – into customer infrastructure, not just demos.
• Own deployments end‑to‑end. Lead discovery, architecture, integration, and rollout for our most strategic accounts, from kickoff to production traffic.
• Hit hard latency and reliability targets. Tune streaming and inference paths to hit sub‑100ms p95s on customer hardware. Diagnose jitter, packet loss, GPU contention, and the other gremlins of real‑time audio.
• Deploy across cloud, VPC, and on‑prem. Navigate security reviews, network constraints, air‑gapped environments, and compliance requirements such as ZDR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and regional data residency.
• Unblock the critical integrations. When a customer’s voice agent breaks at 2 am because their telephony provider changed a codec, you’re the person who finds it and fixes it.
• Drive expansion through building. Spot the next use case before the customer does, prototype it, and turn a single contract into a platform footprint.
• Convert customer signal into product leverage. Feed recurring patterns back to research, infra, and product. Influence the roadmap with what you learn in the field.
• Productize what you build. Turn one‑off integrations into reference architectures, SDK improvements, and templates the next 10 customers can self‑serve from.

• 4+ years building and operating production systems, with strong backend fundamentals.
• Real experience integrating APIs and distributed services into customer infrastructure – not just internal tools.
• Comfort across cloud and containerized environments such as AWS, GCP, and Kubernetes, plus the operational realities that come with them.
• Track record of navigating enterprise constraints: SSO, VPCs, observability, security reviews, procurement.
• Ability to take ambiguous problems, impose structure, and drive them to a working system.
• High ownership and bias for action – you move without waiting for a perfect spec, and you communicate clearly with senior technical stakeholders while doing it.

• Experience in forward‑deployed, solutions, or implementation engineering roles at an infra or AI company.
• Real‑time systems experience:
  WebRTC, streaming protocols, telephony stacks such as Twilio, Live Kit, Pipecat, SIP, or low‑latency audio/video.
• Experience deploying ML/AI systems into production, especially with on‑prem or hybrid constraints.
• Voice agent or conversational AI integration experience.
• Multilingual fluency – particularly Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, or Arabic – to support our international customer base.
• Startup or founding‑engineer experience.

• Remote or in‑person. This role can be fully remote or based out of our Mountain View, CA office – whatever lets you do your best work. For those in the Bay Area, we move fast, we ship together, and some of the best work happens at the whiteboard.
• Visa sponsorship. We sponsor on a case‑by‑case basis depending on role and location. Your recruiter will walk through the details on the first call.
• We ship fast. Voice AI is moving in weeks, not quarters. We hold a high bar on quality and design and we still ship faster than anyone in the category.
• We back each other. Open, direct, low‑ego culture. We tell each other the truth and we make each other better.
• Highly competitive base salary and meaningful equity.
• Platinum medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Daily lunch and dinner in office.
• Unlimited PTO.