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Telnyx is building a Forward Deployed Engineer role in Dubai to embed directly with enterprise customers and architect production systems on Telnyx's global network (voice, messaging, AI, and wireless). You'll work alongside a dedicated Enterprise Account Executive in a pod model—the AE owns the named-account list and commercial relationships; you own technical discovery, architecture, POC design, and production go-live.
You'll embed with enterprise customers to understand their communications workflows and AI use cases, then build and deploy custom implementations including AI Voice Assistants, Telnyx APIs (Voice, Messaging, Fax, Wireless), and WebRTC integrations. You'll run open-weight LLMs in customer environments—consuming models through Telnyx Inference (OpenAI-compatible API) or deploying self-hosted stacks (Llama, Mistral, Arabic-language models like Jais, Fanar) when air-gapped or sovereign-cloud requirements demand it.
Key responsibilities include deploying and operating LiteLLM as a model gateway in customer environments with unified OpenAI-compatible interfaces, routing, load balancing, and virtual key management. You'll instrument and govern LLM usage through the gateway—cost tracking, caching, logging, observability (OpenTelemetry, Langfuse), and guardrails. You'll wire production observability for everything you ship (Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK) so both you and the customer's ops team know what healthy looks like.
You'll design model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads balancing latency, cost, and quality with fallback behavior. You'll make build-vs-buy cases between self-hosted open-weight models and hosted frontier APIs, keeping application code portable across both. You'll adapt models to customer domains with prompt and RAG pipelines for Arabic and English use cases, and navigate UAE/GCC-specific regulatory environments (UAE PDPL, Dubai data sovereignty, cloud localization).
You'll lead POCs, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard to go-live, own customer outcomes until solutions are live and stable, collaborate with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap based on field insights, and create clear technical documentation and runbooks for handoff. You'll troubleshoot complex integration issues alongside customer teams.
**Requirements:**
- CS degree or equivalent experience
- 3+ years building and shipping production software (code that real users depended on, on-call experience, debugging in production; consulting background counts if this applies)
- Proficiency in multiple languages: Python, Node.js/TypeScript, Go
- Practical understanding of production model failure modes: provider rate limits and quotas, timeout and retry behavior, streaming, token accounting and cost attribution, concurrency failure modes
- Comfortable deploying containerized services on Kubernetes with secrets management, config, and upgrades
- 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, parallelism
- Built 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
- Self-sufficient by default; read code and docs, ask customers, 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 on customer sites and in high-stakes technical conversations
- Excellent written and verbal communication in English and Arabic; run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, escalations with customer engineering teams
- Based in Dubai or willing to relocate; hybrid role with travel across UAE and broader GCC
- Legally authorized to work in UAE or eligible for sponsorship
**Bonus:**
- Experience with AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems
- Building eval sets for a specific domain
- Production experience with LLM gateways (LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, in-house OpenAI-compatible proxy) including config-driven model definitions, routing and fallback rules, virtual key management
- Familiarity with open-weight model landscape and trade-offs between regional and multilingual models, including Arabic-language models (Jais, ALLaM, Fanar) and sovereign AI initiatives in GCC
- Experience with inference serving engines (vLLM, SGLang, TGI for production; Ollama for lightweight on-prem) 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 UAE/GCC regulatory frameworks (UAE PDPL, Dubai Data Law, TDRA cloud regulations, GCC data sovereignty, free zone IT environments like DIFC, Dubai Internet City)
- Security mindset (IAM, encryption, audit logging)
