Sr. Forward Deployed Software Engineer - Dubbing Platform
Sarvam AI
Skill Required
Key highlights
- 5–8 years of required experience
- Strong Python and audio/video processing workflows (non-negotiable)
- Work on population-scale AI impact for India
- High ownership and high impact from day one
Role overview
Sarvam is building India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform, focusing on making AI work for India across research, models, infrastructure, and applications. The company partners with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by top-tier investors like Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. The Senior FDSE role involves leading complex, high-touch enterprise deployments of Sarvam’s AI Dubbing Platform, serving as the senior technical partner to media companies, OTT platforms, and content studios. The role requires owning integration architecture, pipeline tuning, and ensuring production-quality multilingual dubbed content at scale, while also setting technical standards for field engineering and mentoring junior engineers.
Responsibilities
- Lead end-to-end integration of Sarvam’s dubbing platform into enterprise content workflows (OTT, media houses, ed-tech, enterprise L&D)
- Own the technical relationship with strategic accounts — scoping requirements, designing integration architecture, and ensuring production readiness
- Debug and resolve complex pipeline issues across the full dubbing stack: audio separation, ASR, translation, TTS, and video stitching
- Tune pipeline parameters (VAD thresholds, translation glossaries, TTS voice profiles, audio mixing) for client-specific content types
- Drive presales engagements — leading technical discovery, scoping POC deployments, and presenting to content/engineering leadership
- Build and maintain integration playbooks, API guides, and troubleshooting runbooks for the dubbing platform
- Define SLA governance across enterprise accounts — setting expectations for turnaround time, quality benchmarks, and escalation resolution
- Act as the primary technical liaison between enterprise clients and Sarvam’s dubbing product and ML engineering teams
- Mentor and provide technical guidance to FDSE engineers in the field
- Contribute fixes and improvements back to internal platform codebases when client deployments surface bugs or gaps
Requirements
- 5–8 years of experience in field engineering, solutions engineering, technical account management, or senior client-facing engineering roles
- Strong Python proficiency — ability to read, debug, and contribute to production FastAPI services and ML pipelines (non-negotiable)
- Experience with audio/video processing workflows: FFmpeg, codec pipelines, media formats, or streaming infrastructure (non-negotiable)
- Proven track record working with enterprise media, OTT, or content localization clients
- Comfort operating across the stack: REST APIs, async job queues (Celery/Redis or similar), PostgreSQL, cloud storage (Azure/GCP/AWS), Kubernetes
- Strong debugging instincts — ability to trace failures across distributed systems (API → queue → worker → ML inference → storage)
- Experience owning SLA management and escalation governance across multiple enterprise accounts
- Excellent communication skills — comfortable engaging CXO/VP-level stakeholders at media companies
Nice to have
- Prior experience with speech/NLP systems: ASR, TTS, machine translation, or audio ML
- Familiarity with Indic languages and the nuances of multilingual content (code-mixing, transliteration, regional dialects)
- Experience with ML serving infrastructure: Triton, ONNX Runtime, or similar model-serving frameworks
- Background in media localization, subtitling, or dubbing workflows (even manual/traditional)
- Experience with WebSocket-based real-time systems or event-driven architectures
- Contributions to open-source audio/video/NLP tools
Benefits
- Fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India
- Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar
- High ownership and high impact, from day one
- Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems
- Work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates
Additional details
- Sarvam partners with India’s leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC
- This role carries significant customer-facing and mentoring responsibility
- You will co-own the most ambitious content localization problem in India: building a platform that dubs video into 12+ Indian languages while preserving speaker voice, tone, and timing
- From ASR accuracy tuning to TTS voice quality and translation fidelity, this is a platform-defining role at the intersection of ML, media, and enterprise delivery