Forward Deployed Engineer, GCC

Role Overview

Forward Deployed Engineer, GCC at Telnyx. This role is based in Riyadh or Dubai, embedding directly with enterprise and public-sector customers to architect and deploy production systems on Telnyx's global network.

Company Overview

Telnyx is an industry leader building the future of global connectivity through a private, global, multi-cloud IP network and hyperlocal edge technology delivered via intuitive APIs. The company is financially stable and profitable, investing in pioneering technologies and fostering continuous learning and growth for its team.

Role Purpose

Embed with enterprise and government customers across the Kingdom to architect and ship production systems—voice, messaging, AI, and wireless—including self-hosted, open-weight LLM deployments that run inside customer environments. Own outcomes from proof of concept to production go-live, balancing engineering excellence with customer success.

Key Responsibilities

Customer Engagement & Discovery

• Embed with enterprise and government customers to understand their communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges firsthand.
• Lead proof of concepts, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard to go-live.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues alongside customer teams.
• Work with customers to meet local regulatory and data-residency requirements (CST/CITC, SDAIA, NCA, and PDPL obligations).

Solution Architecture & Deployment

• Build and deploy custom implementations: AI Voice Assistants, Telnyx APIs (Voice, Messaging, Fax, Wireless), and WebRTC.
• Deploy and operate open-weight LLMs (Llama, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, and Arabic-first models such as ALLaM, Fanar, and Jais) in customer environments, including air-gapped and in-Kingdom sovereign cloud deployments.
• Deploy and operate LiteLLM as the model gateway in customer environments with unified OpenAI-compatible interface across self-hosted open-weight models and hosted providers, including routing, load balancing, retries, fallbacks, rate limits, and per-team virtual keys.
• Design model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads, balancing latency, cost, and quality across Arabic-capable models with sane fallback behavior when a provider degrades.
• Make the build-vs-buy case between self-hosted open-weight models and hosted frontier APIs, and keep the customer's application code portable across both.

LLM Operations & Governance

• Instrument and govern LLM usage through the gateway: cost tracking and budgets, caching, logging and observability (OpenTelemetry, Langfuse, or similar), and guardrails so customers can see and control what their AI workloads are doing.
• Adapt models to customer domains: prompt and RAG pipelines, LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning, and evaluation harnesses for Arabic (including dialectal Arabic) and bilingual Arabic/English use cases.

Outcomes & Documentation

• Own customer outcomes—stay engaged until the solution is live and stable.
• Create clear technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoff, in English and where needed in Arabic.

Strategic Partnership

• Collaborate directly with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap based on field insights from the Saudi and wider MENA market.

Qualifications & Experience

• Computer Science degree or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years building software or doing technical consulting.
• Hands-on experience running LiteLLM (or a comparable LLM gateway such as Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, or an in-house proxy) in production—config-driven model definitions, the proxy server, routing and fallback rules, and virtual key management.
• Exposure to SIP, WebRTC, or real-time voice/messaging systems.
• Background in telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS (bonus).
• Experience with in-Kingdom sovereign or on-prem cloud deployments and PDPL-aligned architectures (bonus).

Skills & Competencies

• Proficiency in multiple languages: Python, Node.js, Go—you are more dangerous in some than others.
• Comfortable deploying containerized services on Kubernetes, with secrets management, config, and upgrades as part of the deployment story.
• Strong API fluency, event-driven thinking, and cloud-native instincts.
• Practical understanding of what breaks in front of a model in production: provider rate limits and quotas, timeout and retry behavior, streaming, token accounting and cost attribution, and the failure modes that only show up under concurrency.
• Ability to translate "it's not working" into root cause.
• Comfortable working on customer sites and in high-stakes technical conversations.
• Experience with an inference serving engine behind the gateway (vLLM, SGLang, TGI, Ollama) and sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models (bonus).
• SQL proficiency (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle) (bonus).
• ETL and data wrangling experience (bonus).
• DevOps fundamentals (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD) (bonus).
• Security mindset (IAM, encryption, audit logging) (bonus).
• Experience with AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems—especially Arabic ASR and speech synthesis (bonus).
• Fine-tuning and post-training experience: LoRA/QLoRA, distillation, preference tuning, or building eval sets for a specific domain (bonus).
• Familiarity with the Arabic open-weight model landscape and the trade-offs between Arabic-first and multilingual models (bonus).
• Fluent spoken Gulf Arabic (Khaleeji)—required, not preferred. You will run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and escalations in Arabic with customer engineering teams.
• Professional working proficiency in English for internal collaboration, documentation, and work with Product and Engineering.

Additional Information

• Based in Riyadh, or willing to relocate—this is a hybrid role with 10–30% travel to customer sites for deployments, workshops, and escalations, primarily across the Kingdom and/or with occasional travel elsewhere in the GCC.
• Legally authorized to work in Saudi Arabia, or eligible for sponsorship.