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Telnyx is building a local Enterprise Sales Pod in Tokyo with one Account Executive and one Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) working together to establish an enterprise business in the market. You will embed directly with enterprise customers to architect and ship production systems on Telnyx's global network, covering voice, messaging, AI, and wireless capabilities.
You'll partner closely with a dedicated Enterprise AE who owns named accounts and executive relationships, while you own the technical side: discovery, architecture, proof-of-concept, and production go-live. This is a true partnership model—no throw-over-the-wall handoffs.
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), and WebRTC
• Run open-weight LLMs in customer environments using Telnyx Inference (OpenAI-compatible API) or deploy self-hosted stacks (Llama, Mistral, Japanese-language models like Swallow, PLaMo) 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 through the gateway with 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 intelligent 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 Japanese and English use cases, and Japan/APAC regulatory environments (APPI, data localization, METI/FSA 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 Japan and APAC
• Create clear 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
• Hands-on observability experience—Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or equivalent; know what to monitor, alert on, and what "healthy" looks like
• High-concurrency experience—Kafka, message queues, or event streams at real scale; understand consumer lag, backpressure, hot partitions, rebalance stalls, partitioning, consumer groups, and 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; read code and docs, ask customers (not your manager), make sound engineering judgment calls independently
• Customer-facing engineering experience—run discovery with customer engineers and present to their 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 and Japanese; run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and escalations with customer engineering teams
• Based in Tokyo or willing to relocate; this is a hybrid role with travel across Japan and broader APAC region
• Legally authorized to work in Japan or eligible for sponsorship
Bonus qualifications: 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 Japanese-language models (Swallow, PLaMo, ELYZA, Rinna); inference serving engines (vLLM, SGLang, TGI, Ollama); SQL proficiency (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle); ETL and data wrangling; CI/CD pipeline design; telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS background; sovereign or on-prem cloud deployments and Japan/APAC regulatory frameworks (APPI, METI, FSA guidelines); security mindset (IAM, encryption, audit logging).
