Applied AI Engineer

Why AssemblyAI

AssemblyAI builds the best-in-class Voice AI models powering the next generation of voice applications. We have a lab, and we also power our own models in our own proprietary inference environment. Our models serve 500M+ inference calls monthly, and process nearly 2 million hours of audio daily. The Voice AI space is at an inflection point; we’re looking for the best talent we can find to join a rapidly scaling team that's defining the future of the industry.

We are one of the most capital-efficient AI companies on the planet - and are rapidly approaching $1M ARR per employee. We sit among the top 5 most revenue-dense teams within the fastest-growing AI companies today. We have thousands of customers building with us including the top startups and world-renowned enterprises, and are serving at tremendous scale: we process nearly 2 million hours of audio daily and handle more than 15 million API calls every day. This is a rare growth-stage opportunity where the business is proven, the revenue is durable, and the growth trajectory is steep and getting steeper. We have a super flat culture and expect our employees to be deeply intimate with the details at all levels.

If you've ever felt buried under layers of bureaucracy, starved of real ownership, or frustrated watching your work disappear into a slow-moving org, AssemblyAI is built differently. The company operates as a true meritocracy, with no heavy planning or approval processes and no gatekeeping on the tools or information you need. For anyone who genuinely cares about voice AI, not as a trend to chase, but as a technology to build, this is the place where the most interesting problems at the most interesting scale are being solved by a team small enough that you'll actually know everyone's name.

About the role

Applied AI Engineers are the technical half of every deal at AssemblyAI. You'll partner with two Digital Native Account Executives and own the technical side of their book: from the first conversation with customers, to helping them win technical evaluations, to driving successful technical implementations.

Our digital native customers are the fastest-growing AI companies building with voice: voice agents, AI notetakers, dictation, and conversation intelligence. They move fast and test on their own, so speed matters at every step.

This is pre-sales engineering, but far more hands-on than a typical SE role. You'll write code for customers, build MVPs, debug their integrations, tune our models on their real audio, and do whatever it takes to make sure customers have successful implementations. Your AE owns the business case and the commercials. You own the developer and the technical work, and together you make customers happy and get them scaled up.

What you'll do

Customer-facing technical work

• Join early, often on the first call, and become the developer's direct line to AssemblyAI in a shared communication channel (often Slack)
• Help our customers evaluate and test our products: get their success criteria up front, help them design fair benchmarks, and catch mistakes (wrong model, bad truth files, misconfigured streams) early
• Tweak configurations and help customers design robust implementations for their unique use cases
• Build demos, prototypes, and proofs of concept in the customer's stack
• Debug customer code and production issues across our streaming and async APIs
• Stay close to the customer, earn their technical trust, and deliver first-class service that turns them into champions
• Work collaboratively with your AEs on every account
• Meet customers in person, including flying around the world to work with them onsite
• Stay with the customer through production rollout, then hand off cleanly to our post-sale Forward Deployed Engineers

Product and roadmap influence

• Influence our roadmap by bringing what you hear from customers to Product, Research, and Engineering, and test new models and features before customers see them
• Turn customer issues into reproducible cases for Research and Engineering, and track patterns across accounts
• Contribute to docs, guides, and example code that help developers integrate faster

Community and events

• Represent AssemblyAI at Voice AI meetups, conferences, and customer events
• Build developer-facing resources that are shared publicly

What you'll need

• A strong technical foundation: an engineering degree, a coding bootcamp, a software engineering role, or a sales or solutions engineering role
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript/JavaScript, and the ability to read and debug code in other languages
• Excellent written and verbal communication; you'll write customer Slack messages, emails, and technical guides every day
• Experience with web APIs, WebSockets, and real-time data streaming
• An understanding of audio fundamentals (sample rates, encodings, codecs), or the drive to learn them quickly
• Fluency with AI tools like Claude or Cursor to prototype, debug, and solve problems fast
• A high sense of urgency and persistence
• Comfort with ambiguity and context-switching: you can take a vague problem, figure out what matters, and drive it to resolution, while keeping many customers and priorities moving at once
• Must be based in San Francisco, London, or New York City, with an expectation of 3 days a week in-office attendance, and willing to travel roughly 10-25% of the time for customer visits, events, and team offsites

Nice to have

• Experience at a startup or API-first company
• Customer-facing experience as a solutions engineer, sales engineer, or developer advocate
• Hands-on work with voice agent frameworks (LiveKit, Pipecat) or speech models
• Public speaking or community involvement

Pay transparency

AssemblyAI strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity across our team. Our salary ranges are set to be competitive for our size, stage, and industry, and reflect just one component of the full compensation, benefits, and rewards we offer.

Salary determinations consider a variety of factors, including relevant experience, technical depth, skills demonstrated during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below represents a general expectation for the posted position. However, we are open to considering candidates who may fall above or below the outlined experience level-in those cases, we will communicate any adjustments to the expected salary range.

The range provided applies to candidates located in the United States and London, UK. For candidates outside of these locations, compensation ranges may differ; any adjustments will be communicated throughout the interview process.

Salary range (US): $150,000 - $250,000 OTE

Salary range (London): £90,000 - £145,000 OTE

The expected total compensation for this role is listed above (including base salary and variable pay). Our total compensation package includes competitive equity grants, 100% employer-paid benefits, and working alongside the team in our San Francisco, New York City or London office. A 401k match up to 4% is offered to all US-based full time team members.

Using AI in your interview

If you’re selected for an interview, please read our Candidate AI Guidance. It explains how you can use AI at each stage of our process, from your application and take-home to the interviews themselves.

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Keep exploring AssemblyAI

Transcribe: Speech-to-Text | Streaming Speech-to-Text

Understand: Speech Understanding | LLM Gateway

Interact: Voice Agent API | Dictation API

Try our models in the Playground

See how 50+ LLMs rank on real voice tasks: Voice Standard Bench

Watch us on YouTube