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Telnyx is building a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role in Bangalore as part of a two-person enterprise sales pod. You'll embed directly with enterprise customers to architect and deploy production systems on Telnyx's global network, covering voice, messaging, AI, and wireless connectivity.
You'll work alongside a dedicated Enterprise Account Executive who owns the named-account list and commercial relationships. Your focus is technical: discovery, architecture, proof-of-concept, and production go-live. The model is collaborative—no throw-over-the-wall handoffs. You win together.
Key responsibilities include:
• Embed with enterprise customers to understand their communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges
• Build and deploy custom implementations: AI Voice Assistants, Telnyx APIs (Voice, Messaging, Fax, Wireless), WebRTC
• Run open-weight LLMs in customer environments—consume models (GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax) through Telnyx Inference, or deploy self-hosted stacks (Llama, Mistral, Indic-language models like BharatGPT, OpenHathi) when air-gapped or sovereign-cloud requirements apply
• Deploy and operate LiteLLM as the model gateway in customer environments, providing unified OpenAI-compatible interfaces with routing, load balancing, retries, fallbacks, rate limits, and virtual key management
• Instrument and govern LLM usage—cost tracking, caching, logging, observability (OpenTelemetry, Langfuse), and guardrails
• Wire production observability for all shipped solutions—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 fallback behavior
• Make build-vs-buy cases between self-hosted open-weight models and hosted frontier APIs, keeping application code portable
• Adapt models to customer domains: prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, evaluation harnesses for English and Indic languages (Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu); navigate India-specific regulatory environments (DPDP Act, data localization, RBI cloud regulations)
• Lead POCs, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard to go-live
• Own customer outcomes—stay engaged until the solution is live and stable
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap based on field insights from India
• Create technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoff
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues alongside customer teams
Requirements:
• CS degree or equivalent experience
• 3+ years building and shipping production software—you've written code that real users depended on, been on-call for it, and debugged it when things broke (consulting background counts if this applies)
• Proficiency in multiple languages: Python, Node.js/TypeScript, Go (Telnyx Edge Compute uses TypeScript)
• Practical understanding of production model failure modes: provider rate limits and quotas, timeout and retry behavior, streaming, token accounting and cost attribution, concurrency-related failures
• Comfortable deploying containerized services on Kubernetes with secrets management, config, and upgrades
• Experience wiring observability and being paged because of it—Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or equivalent
• High-concurrency experience—Kafka, message queues, or event streams at real scale; understanding of consumer lag, backpressure, hot partitions, rebalance stalls, partitioning, consumer groups, parallelism
• Built APIs from scratch, not just consumed them—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
• Self-sufficient by default—no engineering team behind you; you read code and docs, ask customers (not managers), make sound engineering judgment calls independently
• Customer-facing engineering experience—run discovery with customer engineers and present to executives in the same week
• 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; can run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and escalations with customer engineering teams
• Based in Bangalore or willing to relocate; hybrid role with travel across India
• Legally authorized to work in India or eligible for sponsorship
Bonus experience: AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, 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 Indic-language models (BharatGPT, OpenHathi, Bhashini, Sarvam AI); inference serving engines (vLLM, SGLang, TGI, Ollama); GPU capacity sizing; SQL proficiency; ETL and data wrangling; CI/CD pipeline design; telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS background; sovereign or on-prem cloud deployments; Indian regulatory frameworks (DPDP Act, data localization, RBI requirements, MeitY AI governance); security mindset (IAM, encryption, audit logging).
