Forward Deployed Engineer, Audio

Job 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. ### **Turn Deal Work Into Product Leverage** • Work in tandem with the product and core engineering teams to identify areas of growth for the platform based on customer requests and learnings from the front lines. • Identify recurring patterns that should become shared cross-vertical platform capabilities and contribute directly to designing and building them. • Build the audio vertical's technical playbooks and quality standards so the function scales with every new request. ## **What Success Looks Like** ### **30 Days: Learn and Ship** • Learn Protege's platform, audio data landscape, active customer and partner portfolio, and current processing and delivery systems. • Pair with an engineer to work through an existing audio deal to understand what a delivery looks like at Protege. • Map the largest gaps in the audio vertical's tooling and operating model and propose a prioritized plan for addressing them. ### **60 Days: Own End-to-End** • Operate and run an active audio deal as the primary FDE. • Build or meaningfully extend a tool or workflow that spawns from an active customer request. • Establish a communication cycle with other FDEs and product to surface learnings from deals to identify areas of generalization. ### **90 Days: Operate Independently** • Serve as the default technical owner across the audio vertical's active portfolio, including owning multiple active deals. • Own end-to-end architecture and delivery for audio customers, including post-delivery support and iteration. • Establish the first version of the audio FDE playbook and reusable toolkit. • Maintain a concrete roadmap of platform investments with the goal of increasing the vertical's delivery capacity. ## **What You Bring** ### **Must Haves** • 3+ years of experience as an engineer, including meaningful exposure to customers or external technical stakeholders. • Experience working directly with media data, bonus points for direct work with audio data. • Experience building and operating systems that process, analyze, or deliver data at scale. • Customer-facing ability, including translating ambiguous requirements, communicating trade-offs, and building trust with technical stakeholders. • Demonstrated end-to-end ownership, from initial problem definition through implementation, validation, and support. • High ambiguity tolerance and bias to action, with the judgment to know when to investigate further or push back. • Comfort with the intensity and pace of a fast-moving environment, including multiple concurrent priorities and time-sensitive customer work. ### **Nice to Haves** • Experience at an early-stage company, as a founding or early engineer, or in another startup-like environment with broad ownership. • Hands-on experience with Python. • Product engineering experience or a strong product mindset developed in close partnership with users. • Experience with search, vector embeddings, semantic retrieval, or ML-assisted data curation. • Experience with our cloud and data infrastructure (AWS, Dagster, Databricks, Vercel are the key tools). • Experience with audio processing, speech or music ML, transcription, diarization, annotation, quality measurement, or privacy and redaction workflows. ## **Protege Values** **Pass the Loved Ones’ Test** We act with integrity and do the right thing — especially when it’s hard and no one is watching. **Always Find a Way** We are resourceful, resilient builders who solve hard problems and push through obstacles. **Go Fast and Grow Fast** Velocity matters. We move with urgency, learn quickly, and continuously improve as individuals and as a company. **Practice Kindness and Candor** We communicate directly and respectfully, building trust through honest feedback and genuine care for one another. **Deliver Together** We win as one team. Collaboration, accountability, and shared ownership drive our success. **Own the Outcome. Hone the Craft.** We take pride in our work, sweat the details, and continuously raise the bar for excellence.