--- title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Tavus' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-tavus-san-francisco-12jf38gpv182' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Forward Deployed Engineer at Tavus - **Company:** Tavus - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-03-24 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tavus/8964aca2-7693-4566-8d31-823ab8950980 ## Job description ## About Us [Tavus](https://www.tavus.io/) is a research lab pioneering human computing. We’re building AI Humans: a new interface that closes the gap between people and machines, free from the friction of today’s systems. Our real-time human simulation models let machines see, hear, respond, and even look real—enabling meaningful, face-to-face conversations. AI Humans combine the emotional intelligence of humans with the reach and reliability of machines, making them capable, trusted agents available 24/7, in every language, on our terms. Imagine a therapist anyone can afford. A personal trainer who adapts to your schedule. A fleet of medical assistants that can give every patient the attention they need. With Tavus, individuals, enterprises, and developers can all build AI Humans to connect, understand, and act with empathy at scale. We’re a Series B company backed by world-class investors including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, and Scale Venture Partners. Be part of shaping a future where humans and machines truly understand each other. ## The Role This isn’t a traditional engineering job. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll split your time between two worlds: - With customers (30–40%) — working hands-on to debug integrations, unblock adoption, and help them build amazing things with Tavus. - With our product (the rest of the time) — building SDKs, prototypes, and enhancements to our core platform that make Tavus more powerful, intuitive, and delightful to use. You’ll be the bridge between customers and engineering, turning real-world challenges into product improvements. Your mission is simple: ensure every developer and creator has a smooth, magical experience with Tavus — backed by great docs, guides, tools, and product enhancements. Core Responsibilities - Work directly with customers to debug, build POCs, and design solutions. - Build prototypes, SDKs, sample apps, and tools that improve developer experience. - Collect feedback, identify patterns, and translate them into product/engineering improvements. - Partner on early feature adoption: test pre-release features with customers, gather feedback, suggest iterations. - Help define how we develop a world class customer experience What Makes You a Great Fit - Extremely solid software engineering fundamentals. - Deep curiosity about problems at every level of the stack, from ML to infrastructure to networking. - The desire to work closely with end users to understand their problems. - A good “PM hat” to see patterns in customer requests and use those patterns to inform product direction. - A strong bias toward action and a founder mindset to keep going until a problem is truly solved. ## Why This Role Matters - Customers integrate Tavus faster and more reliably because of your support. - Engineering ships changes directly informed by your field learnings. - Prototypes and tools you build demonstrate new use cases and accelerate adoption. - Product priorities are influenced by the patterns you uncover across customers. - The challenge is providing world class customer experience as Tavus grows, while still feeling the customer’s pain and turning it into fast product improvements ## Benefits & Culture When you join Tavus, you’re joining a diverse and supportive team. Our work is driven by our people, and our success is shared by all. This position has a flexible work schedule, unlimited PTO, competitive healthcare, and gear stipends, as well as plenty of fun. At the end of the day, we want Tavus to be a place for you to learn, directly drive impact, and work with a team you love. To learn more about our team culture and benefits, check out our [hiring page](https://www.tavus.io/careers). Tavus is growing fast, and we’d like you to grow with us. If you’re excited to get your hands dirty and help make machines more human, drop your resume and we’ll be in touch. We are not looking for cultural fits, we are looking for culture creators. Diversity is what drives our success – it’s at the core of how we hire, communicate, and work. We are inclusive to all and combine our diverse backgrounds, skill sets, and perspectives to build the best experiences for our clients. ## About Tavus ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Tavus is an AI research lab and platform pioneering "Human Computing," building models and APIs that enable AI to see, hear, understand, and respond with lifelike realism in real-time. - **Entity Type**: Private (Venture-backed) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, CA, United States - **Founded**: 2021 - **Founders**: Hassaan Raza & Quinn Favret ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Human Computing / Multi-modal AI - **Target customers**: B2B; Product teams and developers (via API and no-code builder), enterprise teams (for onboarding, training, support), and prosumers/individuals (for tutors, companions, assistants). - **Mission**: "To make human-AI interaction as natural as face-to-face interaction, enabling the human touch where it has been previously unscalable." [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus) ## Products & Services - **Conversational Video Interface (CVI)**: An API-first platform that allows developers to embed real-time, face-to-face conversational AI into any product. It enables emotionally intelligent, adaptive interactions with sub-second latency. - **Tavus Platform (No-Code SaaS)**: A no-code builder that lets individuals and enterprises create custom AI humans for use in onboarding, training, customer engagement, or personal use by customizing personality, knowledge, and appearance. - **Replica API**: Tools for creating personal or stock digital twins (replicas) with studio-grade fidelity, full-face rendering, and identity preservation. Supports both individual and large-scale deployment. - **Personas**: A system for defining custom personalities and context to tailor the behavior of AI humans. - **Core AI Models**: - **Sparrow (Conversational Flow Model)**: Delivers low-latency, accurate turn-taking by analyzing lexical, semantic, prosodic, and acoustic cues. - **Raven (Perception Model)**: A multi-modal perception engine that translates facial expressions, tone, gaze, and emotion into conversational signals. - **Phoenix (Rendering Model)**: A gaussian-diffusion based model for high-fidelity, photorealistic facial rendering with contextually accurate emotions and expressions in real time. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/) ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric**: **Total Funding**: $40M+ (including a $18M raise in 2024 and a subsequent Series B for $40M in 2025). [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus), [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator (Summer 2021 batch), HubSpot. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/lp/ai-info-page) - **Growth Signals**: - Demonstrated product-market fit with case studies for clients like Final Round AI (1.2M practice minutes logged), ACTO (life sciences training), and CareFlick (senior companionship). - Raising significant venture capital over multiple rounds, indicating strong investor confidence and a long runway for R&D. ## Competitive Advantages - **Real-time realism**: Overcomes the "uncanny valley" with sub-second latency and photorealistic rendering, a key differentiator from asynchronous video-generation and static avatar companies. - **Comprehensive AI Human Stack**: Offers a full operating system (perception, memory, knowledge, action) rather than just a single component like an avatar. - **Flexibility**: Provides multiple integration paths—a modular API, a bring-your-own-LLM option, and a no-code builder—making it accessible to both technical and non-technical users. - **Ethical foundation**: Built with a stated commitment to privacy, consent, and empathy, and aims for transparency in disclosure (e.g., SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance). ## Strategic Focus - **Category Creation**: Actively establishing "Human Computing" as a new industry standard for human-AI interaction, moving beyond simple chatbots and scripted avatars. - **Developer Ecosystem**: Centered on an API-first strategy to become the platform of choice for developers building the next generation of AI assistants, companions, and employees. - **Real-time & Multi-modal**: Continuing to push the boundaries of multi-modal AI (video, audio, text, emotion) to create more intuitive and authentic interactions. - **Enterprise & Prosumer Scale**: Growing the no-code platform to serve both enterprise-scale training/support and personal use cases (tutoring, wellness, companionship). ## Why Work Here - **Cutting-edge Research & Impact**: A chance to work on frontier multi-modal AI models (perception, rendering, conversation) that directly shape how humans interact with machines. - **Culture**: Described as a tight-knit, high-output team with semi-annual full-team retreats and a focus on continuous learning alongside AI leaders. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/careers) - **Compensation & Benefits**: Offers competitive salary, meaningful equity, fully covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and their families, unlimited PTO, and a gear stipend for setting up the workspace. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/careers) - **Work Environment**: "Our team moves mountains to bring the vision to life, and we’ve got their backs." The company appears to embrace a hybrid/office culture in San Francisco (SOMA) with remote options for some roles (e.g., Senior Software Engineer). [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus) - **Team Growth**: Team size reported as around 40 members. Currently hiring for roles like AI Researcher (Perception), Customer Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, and Solution Engineer. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus), [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tavus) ## Sources 1. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/) 2. [tavus.io/careers](https://www.tavus.io/careers) 3. [tavus.io/lp/ai-info-page](https://www.tavus.io/lp/ai-info-page) 4. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus) 5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tavus) 6. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com) ## Other roles at Tavus - [Senior Software Engineer (CVI)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-cvi-tavus-san-francisco-0xy8c3dnhxe0) — San Francisco, CA - [Vibe Growth Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/vibe-growth-marketer-tavus-san-francisco-ynha49h58qg6) — San Francisco, CA - [Business Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-tavus-san-francisco-vaebfha9r4ex) — San Francisco, CA - [Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-tavus-san-francisco-813z9bn38tfr) — San Francisco, CA - [Brand & Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/brand-product-designer-tavus-san-francisco-8ph3kwhaykea) — San Francisco, CA - [Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-tavus-san-francisco-w8gfpeca4wqe) — San Francisco, CA - [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-tavus-san-francisco-eh3s3n051tk8) — San Francisco, CA - [AI Researcher (Multimodal Audio/Video Generation)](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-multimodal-audio-video-generation-tavus-san-francisco-rebzx76z9c96) — San Francisco, CA - [Marketer (Brand, Product, Storytelling)](https://feeny.ai/job/marketer-brand-product-storytelling-tavus-san-francisco-3avcsehy2hny) — San Francisco, CA - [Conversational Modelling Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/conversational-modelling-research-engineer-tavus-remote-rhfhte0fhg6v)