Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Model API at Sarvam

About Sarvam Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India’s leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC. About the Role Sarvam’s Model APIs power voice-first, multilingual applications across India — from real-time speech transcription and synthesis to document digitisation and LLM-driven workflows. As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you will work at the intersection of engineering and customer success: building production-grade applications, running technical onboardings, and ensuring that developers and enterprises can extract full value from Sarvam’s platform. This is a high-impact engineering role. You will build reference implementations, debug complex integration issues, and serve as the primary technical interface for Sarvam’s most strategic customers — from early-stage startups to large enterprises. What You’ll Do Build • Design and ship full-stack applications using Sarvam APIs — voice agents, post-call analytics pipelines, multilingual chatbots, document digitisation and extraction workflows, and LLM-powered reasoning applications. • Develop reference implementations, integration guides, and cookbooks that set the standard for how developers build on Sarvam. • Use AI-native development tools to accelerate engineering output without compromising code quality or reliability. Deploy & Scale • Architect systems designed for production from day one — with appropriate handling of concurrency, latency, retries, and rate limits. • Diagnose and resolve complex integration issues across the full stack — from audio encoding and streaming behaviour to API authentication and model output. • Advise customers on system design, helping them move from proof-of-concept to production without fundamental re-architecture. Customer Engagement • Serve as the primary technical point of contact for high-priority customers during POC and early production phases. • Lead technical onboarding sessions, architecture reviews, and live debugging calls. • Synthesise customer feedback into clear, actionable product input for Sarvam’s engineering teams. What We’re Looking For • 2–5 years of software engineering experience, with strong fundamentals in at least one backend language (Python preferred) and the ability to deliver end-to-end. • A track record of building complete, functional systems that run in production — not just prototypes. • Hands-on, daily use of AI-native development tools as a genuine productivity multiplier. • Strong debugging and systems thinking: the ability to trace a fault from an API response back through network behaviour, SDK configuration, and model output. • Excellent communication skills — equally effective presenting architecture to a senior technical audience and pairing through an integration issue with a junior developer. Bonus Points • Experience with speech and audio APIs, real-time streaming via WebSockets, or voice agent frameworks such as LiveKit or Pipecat. • Prior experience in a customer-facing engineering capacity — solutions engineering, developer advocacy, or technical consulting. • Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, including prompt design, tool use, structured output handling, and multi-turn conversation architecture. • Experience building document intelligence pipelines — structured extraction, OCR, and multi-language document handling. • Familiarity with the characteristics of Indian language audio and text — code-mixing, script variation, and regional accent diversity. • Experience deploying and scaling applications on cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred). Why Sarvam? Sarvam is a fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India, working on problems that push the frontiers of AI with real population-scale impact. • 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. • You can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates. If you want to work on problems at the frontier of AI in India, Sarvam is the place to be.