Role Overview
The Forward Deployed Engineer UKI role at Telnyx is a hybrid technical position based in London, England, where the professional embeds directly with enterprise clients to architect and launch production systems. This job suits a self-sufficient engineer with a background in building real-world software who wants to partner with an enterprise sales executive to drive technical discovery, proofs of concept, and go-lives across the UK and Ireland.
Key Responsibilities
Embed directly with enterprise customers to evaluate their communication workflows, integration hurdles, and AI use cases.
Build and deploy custom implementations utilizing WebRTC, Telnyx APIs for voice, messaging, fax, and wireless, and AI voice assistants.
Run open-weight large language models in client environments via Telnyx Inference or deploy self-hosted stacks when air-gapped or sovereign-cloud requirements dictate.
Deploy and manage LiteLLM as a model gateway in client environments, providing unified interfaces, routing, load balancing, rate limits, and virtual keys.
Implement governance for LLM usage through gateways, handling cost tracking, budgets, caching, logging, and guardrails.
Establish production observability by wiring metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting through tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, or ELK.
Formulate model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads, balancing latency, cost, and quality with appropriate fallback behavior.
Build build-versus-buy cases between hosted frontier APIs and self-hosted open-weight models, maintaining application code portability.
Adapt models to specific client domains by developing prompt and RAG pipelines and evaluation harnesses aligned with UK and Irish regulatory standards.
Lead technical proofs of concept, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard design to successful deployment.
Collaborate closely with internal Product and Engineering teams to share field insights from the UK and Ireland.
Produce comprehensive technical documentation, runbooks, and troubleshooting solutions alongside client teams.
Requirements
Computer Science degree or equivalent professional experience.
3+ years of experience building and shipping production software, managing on-call duties, and debugging critical issues.
Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Node.js, TypeScript, and Go.
Practical understanding of production failure modes including rate limits, timeouts, streaming behavior, token accounting, and concurrency issues.
Competency in deploying containerized services on Kubernetes, managing secrets, configurations, and upgrades.
Experience implementing observability and handling alerts using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, or ELK.
High-concurrency experience working with Kafka, message queues, or event streams at scale.
Experience designing and building APIs from scratch, encompassing OpenAPI specs, REST or GraphQL design, auth, rate limiting, versioning, and idempotency.
Event-driven thinking and cloud-native technical instincts.
Exposure to real-time voice, messaging, SIP, or WebRTC systems.
Strong self-sufficiency skills to read code and documentation and make independent engineering judgments.
Customer-facing engineering experience running discovery sessions with client engineers and presenting to executives.
Excellent English verbal and written communication skills.
Based in London or willing to relocate, with the ability to travel across the UK and Ireland.
Legally authorized to work in the UK or eligible for sponsorship.
Nice to Have
Experience working with AI voice assistants, STT, TTS, or LLM conversational systems.
Ability to build evaluation sets for specific domains.
Hands-on production experience with LLM gateways such as LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, or internal proxies.
Familiarity with the open-weight model landscape, regional models, and multilingual trade-offs.
Experience with inference serving engines like vLLM, SGLang, TGI, or Ollama, and sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models.
SQL proficiency in Postgres, MySQL, or Oracle.
Background in ETL, data wrangling, or CI/CD pipeline design.
Experience in telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS environments.
Knowledge of sovereign cloud deployments, UK GDPR, Data Protection Act 2018, EU AI Act, NIS Regulations, and FCA operational resilience requirements.
Security mindset covering IAM, encryption, and audit logging.
Skills and Tools
Python
SQL
Kubernetes
Node.js
TypeScript
LLM
RAG
Kafka
About the Company
Telnyx builds global connectivity solutions, operating a private multi-cloud IP network and providing hyperlocal edge technology through intuitive APIs. The company is financially stable and profitable, fostering an environment of continuous learning and growth while eliminating antiquated processes through innovative connectivity primitives.
How to Apply
Interested candidates should visit the official Telnyx careers page to submit an application for this role.
