Role Overview
The Forward Deployed Engineer position at Telnyx is an on-site technical role based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This opportunity is well-suited for a software engineer with over three years of experience who enjoys working directly with enterprise clients to design and ship production-scale systems. Working within a dedicated local Enterprise Sales Pod, the professional in this role will drive technical discovery, architecture, proof of concepts, and production go-live outcomes across voice, messaging, AI, and wireless technologies.
Key Responsibilities
Embed directly with enterprise customers to understand communications workflows, integration challenges, and AI use cases firsthand.
Build and deploy custom implementations involving AI Voice Assistants, WebRTC, and Telnyx APIs.
Run open-weight large language models in customer environments using Telnyx Inference or deploy self-hosted stacks when sovereign-cloud or air-gapped requirements apply.
Deploy and operate LiteLLM as a model gateway in customer environments with routing, load balancing, fallbacks, and virtual keys.
Instrument and govern LLM usage through the gateway, tracking costs, budgets, caching, logging, and guardrails.
Wire production observability for everything shipped, using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting.
Design model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads, balancing latency, cost, and quality.
Adapt models to customer domains via prompt and RAG pipelines and evaluation harnesses for English and Arabic use cases under KSA and GCC regulatory environments.
Lead proofs of concept, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard sessions to go-live milestones.
Collaborate directly with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap using field insights gathered from Saudi Arabia and the broader GCC region.
Create clear technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoffs.
Requirements
Holds a Computer Science degree or possesses equivalent practical experience.
Brings 3+ years of building and shipping production software with a track record of writing code that real users depend on.
Proficient in multiple programming languages, including Python, Node.js, TypeScript, or Go.
Possesses a practical understanding of production failure modes such as rate limits, timeouts, retries, streaming, and token accounting.
Comfortable deploying containerized services on Kubernetes, managing secrets, configs, and upgrades.
Experienced in wiring observability and handling on-call rotations using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, or ELK.
Brings high-concurrency experience working with Kafka, message queues, or event streams at real scale.
Able to build APIs from scratch, covering OpenAPI specs, REST or GraphQL design, auth, rate limiting, versioning, and idempotency.
Demonstrates event-driven thinking and cloud-native instincts alongside exposure to SIP, WebRTC, or real-time voice and messaging systems.
Acts as self-sufficient by default, capable of making sound engineering judgment calls independently.
Possesses customer-facing engineering experience, running discovery with client engineers and presenting to executives.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills in both English and Arabic.
Based in Riyadh or willing to relocate for this hybrid role that includes travel across the Kingdom and broader GCC.
Legally authorized to work in Saudi Arabia or eligible for sponsorship.
Nice to Have
Experience with AI voice assistants, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or LLM-based conversational systems.
Background in building evaluation sets for specific domains.
Hands-on production experience with an LLM gateway such as LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, or an in-house proxy.
Familiarity with regional and multilingual models, including Arabic-language models like Jais, ALLaM, and Fanar, alongside regional sovereign AI initiatives.
Experience with inference serving engines like vLLM, SGLang, TGI, or Ollama, and sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models.
SQL proficiency across databases like Postgres, MySQL, or Oracle.
ETL and data wrangling experience alongside CI/CD pipeline design and automation.
Background in telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS.
Exposure to sovereign or on-prem cloud deployments and KSA or GCC regulatory frameworks including PDPL, data localization, and NCA cloud regulations.
Security mindset encompassing IAM, encryption, and audit logging.
Skills and Tools
Python
SQL
Kubernetes
Node.js
TypeScript
LLM
RAG
Kafka
WebRTC
Prometheus
Grafana
OpenTelemetry
About the Company
Telnyx is an industry leader building the future of global connectivity through a private global multi-cloud IP network and intuitive APIs. The company shapes seamless interconnection between people, devices, and applications by automating manual processes and solving real-world problems with innovative solutions. Financially stable and profitable, Telnyx invests in pioneering technologies and fosters continuous learning and growth for its team members worldwide.
How to Apply
Interested candidates should visit the official Telnyx careers page to submit an application for this role.
