Forward Deployed Engineer, Audio
The Forward Deployed Engineer will manage technical customer engagements for audio datasets, building scalable data pipelines and tools to support AI training. This role requires balancing direct customer communication with hands-on engineering to transform raw audio into high-quality, production-ready datasets.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 3+ years of experience as an engineer with exposure to customers or external technical stakeholders
- Experience working directly with media data
- Experience building and operating systems that process, analyze, or deliver data at scale
- Customer-facing ability including translating ambiguous requirements and communicating trade-offs
- Demonstrated end-to-end ownership from problem definition through implementation and support
- High ambiguity tolerance and bias to action
Nice to have
- Direct work with audio data
- Experience at an early-stage company or startup environment
- Hands-on experience with Python
- Product engineering experience
- Experience with search, vector embeddings, semantic retrieval, or ML-assisted data curation
- Experience with AWS, Dagster, Databricks, or Vercel
- Experience with audio processing, speech or music ML, transcription, diarization, annotation, or privacy workflows
Full description
Company Overview:
We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI — getting access to the right training data. The process today is time intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.
Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We’re backed by world-class investors and already powering partnerships with some of the most ambitious teams in AI. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI — and in tech.
We’re a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who are obsessed with velocity and impact. Our culture is built for people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI.
About the Role
Protege is hiring an FDE to support our audio vertical. This is an engineering role with two key mandates: own the technical success for all audio customers, and build the reusable pipes that enable future scale. You will partner closely with the GM of the vertical, product and platform engineering, Data Lab, and commercial teams to navigate external requirements and develop solutions to execute on those requirements. Audio is a rapidly developing and evolving area at Protege — this role will be instrumental in defining how the function operates.
This role is ideal for engineers who prioritize both constantly learning through solving difficult problems and interfacing and directly owning customer outcomes. You'll be responsible for managing customer requests, newly ingested partner datasets and architecture decisions all at the same time, often across multiple deals. The pace is fast, the ambiguity is real, and when deals are live, availability outside standard hours is part of the job. If this type of environment and ownership excites you, there could be a strong fit.
What You'll Do
Build the Technical Foundation for Audio
- Develop and own the solutions that turn raw audio, with often unstructured or non-existent metadata, into organized and ready-to-sell datasets.
- Build prototypes and phase them into reliable production systems that others can understand and operate.
- Rapidly characterize large and unfamiliar audio datasets and determine whether they can support a customer's use case.
Own Customer Engagements End to End
- Work with the GM of the audio vertical, core technical teams, and commercial stakeholders from feasibility through post-delivery support.
- Translate a customer's model-development goals into an executable technical plan with clear acceptance criteria.
- Own the implementation and operation of the engagements you lead.