Forward Deployed Engineer SA

About the Role

Telnyx is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join its Enterprise Sales Pod in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This full-time role involves embedding directly with enterprise customers to architect and implement production systems on Telnyx's global network, covering voice, messaging, AI, and wireless. The position focuses on building scalable solutions rather than solely demonstrating products, working closely with a dedicated Enterprise Account Executive.

Key Responsibilities

• Embed with enterprise customers to understand their communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges.
• Build and deploy custom implementations, including AI Voice Assistants, Telnyx APIs (Voice, Messaging, Fax, Wireless), and WebRTC.
• Operate open-weight LLMs in customer environments, consuming models via Telnyx Inference or deploying self-hosted stacks.
• Deploy and operate LiteLLM as a model gateway in customer environments, providing a unified OpenAI-compatible interface with routing, load balancing, and other features.
• Instrument and govern LLM usage through the gateway, including cost tracking, caching, logging, and guardrails.
• Wire production observability for all deployed solutions, including metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting.
• Design model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads, balancing latency, cost, and quality.
• Evaluate build-vs-buy scenarios for self-hosted open-weight models versus hosted frontier APIs, ensuring application code portability.
• Adapt models to customer domains, including prompt and RAG pipelines for Arabic and English language use cases and KSA/GCC regulatory environments.
• Lead POCs, pilots, and production launches from initial design to go-live.
• Own customer outcomes, ensuring solutions are live and stable.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to inform the roadmap based on field insights from Saudi Arabia and the broader GCC.
• Create technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoff.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues with customer teams.

Qualifications and Experience

• CS degree or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of experience building and shipping production software, including coding for real users, on-call duties, and debugging.
• Proficiency in multiple programming languages: Python, *************, Go.
• Practical understanding of production model failures, including rate limits, timeouts, streaming, token accounting, and concurrency issues.
• Experience deploying containerized services on Kubernetes, including secrets management, config, and upgrades.
• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, or ELK, and understanding of monitoring and alerting protocols.
• High-concurrency experience with Kafka, message queues, or event streams at scale.
• Experience building APIs from scratch, including OpenAPI spec, REST/GraphQL design, authentication, rate limiting, versioning, and idempotency.
• Event-driven thinking and cloud-native instincts.
• Exposure to SIP, WebRTC, or real-time voice/messaging systems.
• Self-sufficient approach to problem-solving, including reading code and documentation, and making independent engineering judgments.
• Customer-facing engineering experience, including running discovery with engineers and presenting to executives.
• Ability to diagnose root causes from reported issues.
• Comfortable working on customer sites and participating in high-stakes technical conversations.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience with AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems.
• Building evaluation sets for specific domains.
• Hands-on production experience with an LLM gateway (*, LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway).
• Familiarity with the open-weight model landscape and trade-offs, including Arabic-language models (Jais, ALLaM, Fanar) and sovereign AI initiatives in the GCC.
• Experience with an inference serving engine behind the gateway (*, vLLM, SGLang, TGI) and sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models.
• SQL proficiency (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle).
• ETL and data wrangling experience.
• CI/CD pipeline design and automation.
• Background in telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS.
• Experience with sovereign or on-prem cloud deployments and KSA/GCC regulatory frameworks (*, PDPL, Saudi data localization).
• Security mindset (IAM, encryption, audit logging).

Work Environment and Location

This is a hybrid role based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, requiring willingness to relocate if not already based there. The position involves travel across the Kingdom and the broader GCC region. Candidates must be legally authorized to work in Saudi Arabia or eligible for sponsorship.