Kiley Williams is the Senior Engineering Manager of Deepgram's Field Engineering team, holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and is a two-time founder with one successful exit. His team has one job: close the gap between what Deepgram builds and how the world uses it. He has been doing that job, in one form or another, for more than twenty years. When a powerful technology arrives before the world is ready to trust it, he has made a habit of showing up early, building the systems and leading the people who put it to work.

The pattern took hold at Microsoft, where he was a technical program manager delivering experimental SharePoint features and tools, and the work that excited him most happened on the side, in AI-driven metadata inference. He then struck out on his own to co-found Thyme Technologies, a scheduling startup. When 7mb Technologies acquired Thyme's assets, he stayed on, rising from Software Architect to Chief Technology Officer and building a team of designers, engineers, and product managers.

At Polyverse, he brought compiler-based Linux security to the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and enterprise customers, and he demonstrated the technology at events around the world. He crossed over into conversational AI at Helpshift, directing the global solutions engineering teams behind its enterprise implementations. The partnership that he initiated there led to Helpshift's $75 million sale to Keywords. At Deepgram, he is doing it again with voice AI.

The oldest thread in his career is teaching. He wrote his first programs at eight years old, and he still spends part of his time helping other people write theirs. He has taught full-stack JavaScript as a course instructor, and he volunteers with Coders Without Borders, a program that helps aspiring developers around the world launch software careers. Mentorship, he believes, is among the highest-leverage contributions that an engineer can make, and his advice for anyone who ever had a great teacher is simple: pay it forward.