Forward Deployed Engineer - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

About Telnyx

Telnyx leads the charge in global connectivity innovation by building a private, multi-cloud IP network and delivering edge technology through user-friendly APIs. Our mission is to modernize outdated systems, automate processes, and provide innovative connectivity to enable seamless communication between people, devices, and applications. As a profitable and financially stable company, we invest in cutting-edge technologies and foster continual learning and growth for our team.

Role Overview

We are establishing a local Enterprise Sales Pod in Riyadh, comprising an Account Executive (AE) and a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE). The FDE will work intimately with enterprise customers, designing and deploying production systems using Telnyx's global network services, including voice, messaging, AI, and wireless technologies. This role involves deeply technical work to create real-world scalable solutions rather than merely demonstrating products.

Pod Structure

• The Enterprise AE manages account relationships, commercial qualification, and deal closures.
• The Forward Deployed Engineer leads technical discovery, architecture design, proof-of-concept builds, and production deployments.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with enterprise clients to understand communication workflows, AI applications, and integration issues.
• Develop and implement tailored solutions involving AI Voice Assistants, Telnyx APIs (Voice, Messaging, Fax, Wireless), and WebRTC technologies.
• Run and manage open-weight large language models in customer setups, supporting various architectures depending on infrastructure and sovereignty needs.
• Deploy and operate LiteLLM as a unified interface for managing self-hosted and hosted LLM services, including traffic management and API key control.
• Implement governance for LLM usage with monitoring tools, cost management, logging, observability, and AI workload guardrails.
• Set up comprehensive production observability with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerts using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, or ELK stacks.
• Design intelligent model routing strategies focusing on latency, cost-effectiveness, and reliability for real-time voice workloads.
• Guide customers on build versus buy decisions between self-hosted models and hosted frontier APIs while maintaining code portability.
• Customize AI models for Arabic and English domains and ensure compliance with KSA/GCC regulatory standards, including data localization and sovereignty.
• Lead pilots, proofs-of-concept, and live production system launches from initial design through stable operation.
• Take full ownership of customer outcomes, remaining engaged through live deployment and stabilization.
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to influence Telnyx's roadmap based on field experience in Saudi Arabia and the GCC.
• Create clear, maintainable technical documentation and runbooks for smooth handoffs.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration challenges alongside customer teams.

Requirements

• A computer science degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum 3 years of experience designing and deploying production software with responsibility for on-call support and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in multiple programming languages such as Python, Node.js/TypeScript, and Go, with TypeScript being particularly valuable for Telnyx Edge Compute functions.
• Strong practical understanding of LLM production failure modes, including rate limits, retries, streaming, token usage, and concurrency issues.
• Experience deploying containerized services with Kubernetes, managing secrets, configurations, and upgrades.
• Skilled in instrumenting observability solutions and responding to alerts using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or equivalent stacks.
• Experience with high-concurrency systems like Kafka or distributed message queues, handling consumer lag, partitions, and scaling concerns.
• Ability to build APIs from the ground up following best practices including OpenAPI, REST/GraphQL design, authentication, rate limiting, and version control.
• Cloud-native and event-driven system experience.
• Familiarity with SIP, WebRTC, or real-time communication platforms.
• Self-motivated and resourceful, able to independently solve problems and make engineering decisions.
• Strong customer-facing engineering skills, capable of conducting technical discovery and executive presentations within a short timeframe.
• Skilled at diagnosing root causes of issues and managing high-pressure, technical discussions onsite with customers.
• Excellent verbal and written communication abilities in both English and Arabic, including conducting whiteboard sessions and escalations.
• Residing in Riyadh or willing to relocate; role involves hybrid work with travel across the Kingdom and GCC.
• Legal authorization to work in Saudi Arabia or eligibility for sponsorship.

Bonus Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with AI voice assistants, speech-to-text/text-to-speech, or LLM conversational platforms.
• Expertise in building evaluation sets for specific domains.
• Experience with LLM gateway products (e.g., LiteLLM, Portkey) including configuration, routing, fallback, and API key management.
• Knowledge of open-weight and regional Arabic-language AI models and understanding of GCC sovereign AI initiatives.
• Experience with inference serving engines such as vLLM, SGLang, or TGI, and on-prem lightweight solutions like Ollama, including GPU capacity planning.
• Proficiency in SQL databases including Postgres, MySQL, and Oracle.
• Background in ETL and data wrangling.
• Experience designing and automating CI/CD pipelines.
• Industry experience in telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS companies.
• Familiarity with KSA/GCC data sovereignty regulations and cloud environments including PDPL, Saudi data localization, NCA regulations, and giga-project IT infrastructures.
• Security-focused mindset emphasizing IAM, encryption, and audit logging.