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Telnyx is building a Forward Deployed Engineer role embedded in a local Enterprise Sales Pod in Paris. You'll work alongside a dedicated Enterprise Account Executive to architect and ship production systems on Telnyx's global network, serving enterprise customers across France and the Nordic region (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland).
This is a hands-on technical role focused on real production outcomes, not demos. You'll own the technical side of enterprise deals: discovery, architecture, proof-of-concept design, and production go-live. Your responsibilities include:
• Embed directly with enterprise customers to understand their communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges
• Build and deploy custom implementations using Telnyx APIs (Voice, Messaging, Fax, Wireless), WebRTC, and AI Voice Assistants
• Deploy and operate open-weight LLMs in customer environments—both through Telnyx Inference (OpenAI-compatible API) and self-hosted stacks (Llama, Mistral, region-specific models like CroissantLLM) for air-gapped or sovereign-cloud scenarios
• Deploy and manage LiteLLM as a model gateway in customer environments, providing unified OpenAI-compatible interfaces with routing, load balancing, retries, fallbacks, rate limiting, and virtual key management
• Instrument and govern LLM usage through the gateway—cost tracking, caching, logging, observability (OpenTelemetry, Langfuse), and guardrails
• Wire production observability for all systems shipped—metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting (Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK)
• Design model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads, balancing latency, cost, and quality with intelligent fallback behavior
• Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions between self-hosted open-weight models and hosted frontier APIs, keeping application code portable
• Adapt models to customer domains: prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, and evaluation harnesses for French, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish language use cases and EU regulatory environments (GDPR, EU AI Act, French data sovereignty, Nordic data protection)
• Lead POCs, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard to go-live
• Own customer outcomes—stay engaged until solutions are live and stable
• Create technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoff
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues alongside customer teams
• Collaborate directly with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap based on field insights
You'll be self-sufficient by default—reading code and docs, asking customers directly, and making sound engineering judgment calls independently. You'll also be customer-facing, running discovery sessions with customer engineers and presenting to their executives.
REQUIREMENTS:
• CS degree or equivalent experience
• 3+ years building and shipping production software—code that real users depended on, on-call experience, and debugging in production (consulting background counts if this applies)
• Proficiency in multiple languages: Python, Node.js/TypeScript, Go (TypeScript is especially valuable for Telnyx Edge Compute)
• Practical understanding of production LLM failure modes: provider rate limits, quotas, timeout/retry behavior, streaming, token accounting, cost attribution, and concurrency-related failures
• Comfortable deploying containerized services on Kubernetes with secrets management, config, and upgrades
• Experience wiring observability (Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK) and being on-call
• High-concurrency experience with Kafka, message queues, or event streams at scale—understanding consumer lag, backpressure, hot partitions, rebalance stalls
• Experience building APIs from scratch (OpenAPI spec, REST/GraphQL design, auth, rate limiting, versioning, idempotency)
• Event-driven thinking and cloud-native instincts
• Exposure to SIP, WebRTC, or real-time voice/messaging systems
• Customer-facing engineering experience—discovery with customer engineers and executive presentations
• Ability to translate "it's not working" into root cause
• Comfortable working on customer sites and in high-stakes technical conversations
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English and French—whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, escalations
• Based in Paris or willing to relocate; hybrid role with travel across France and the Nordics
• Legally authorized to work in France or eligible for sponsorship
BONUS:
• AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems
• Building eval sets for specific domains
• Production experience with LLM gateways (LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway)
• Familiarity with open-weight model landscape and EU sovereign AI initiatives (Mistral, Aleph Alpha, Silo AI, Götalagsprojektet)
• Inference serving engines (vLLM, SGLang, TGI, Ollama) and GPU capacity sizing
• SQL proficiency (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle)
• ETL and data wrangling
• CI/CD pipeline design
• Telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS background
• Sovereign/on-prem cloud deployments and EU regulatory frameworks (GDPR, EU AI Act, French data sovereignty, SecNumCloud, Nordic data protection, Schrems II)
• Security mindset (IAM, encryption, audit logging)
