Forward Deployed Engineer, Benelux
About this role
The local Enterprise Sales Pod in Amsterdam builds the Telnyx enterprise business across the Benelux market by embedding directly with enterprise customers to architect and ship production systems. This team develops solutions spanning global communications, voice, messaging, wireless, and AI use cases such as AI contact centers and SOC/NOC agents on the Telnyx network. Working alongside a dedicated Enterprise Account Executive, the Forward Deployed Engineer owns the complete technical lifecycle including discovery, architecture, proofs of concept, and production go-lives.
This role exists to lead customer-facing technical engagements without handoffs, designing custom implementations of WebRTC, Telnyx APIs, and open-weight or self-hosted large language models. Professionals who thrive in this environment are self-sufficient by default, capable of running discovery with customer engineers while presenting to executives, and comfortable making independent engineering judgment calls. Candidates must be based in Amsterdam or willing to relocate for this hybrid position with travel across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
What you will do
- Embed with enterprise customers to understand communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges firsthand.
- Build and deploy custom implementations using AI Voice Assistants, Telnyx APIs, and WebRTC.
- Run open-weight large language models in customer environments or deploy self-hosted stacks behind serving engines when required.
- Deploy and operate LiteLLM as the model gateway in customer environments to manage routing, load balancing, retries, fallbacks, and virtual keys.
- Wire production observability for everything shipped using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting tools.
- Design model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads that balance latency, cost, and quality with fallback behavior.
- Adapt models to customer domains through prompt and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and evaluation harnesses for Dutch and French language use cases under regional regulatory environments.
- Lead proofs of concept, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard to go-live while collaborating with product and engineering teams.
What you need
- Hold a computer science degree or equivalent professional experience.
- Demonstrate at least three years of experience building, shipping, and maintaining production software that real users depend on.
- Show proficiency in multiple programming languages such as Python, Node.js, TypeScript, or Go.
- Possess practical understanding of production failure modes in front of models, including rate limits, timeouts, retries, and token accounting.
- Be comfortable deploying containerized services on Kubernetes with proper secrets management, configuration, and upgrades.
- Demonstrate experience wiring observability and managing alerts using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or equivalent tools.
- Have high-concurrency experience handling Kafka, message queues, or event streams at real scale.
- Communicate excellently in both English and Dutch to run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and executive presentations.
Nice to have
- Experience with AI voice assistants, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or LLM-based conversational systems
- Building evaluation sets for a specific domain
- Hands-on production experience with an LLM gateway such as LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, or an in-house OpenAI-compatible proxy
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy for this position?
This is a hybrid role based in Amsterdam, or requires willingness to relocate, with travel across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
What tools and technologies make up the tech stack?
Engineers work with Python, Node.js, TypeScript, Go, Kubernetes, Kafka, WebRTC, LiteLLM, and various observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
How is the team structured for customer engagements?
The team operates in a pod model consisting of an Enterprise Account Executive who owns the commercial relationship and a Forward Deployed Engineer who owns the technical lifecycle from discovery to production.
What is the policy regarding visa sponsorship?
Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the Netherlands or be eligible for sponsorship.