Forward Deployed Engineer, GCC

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our team in Riyadh. In this hybrid role, you'll embed directly with enterprise and public-sector customers across the Kingdom to architect and ship production systems on Telnyx's global network — voice, messaging, AI, and wireless — including self-hosted, open-weight LLM deployments that run inside customer environments. This isn't about demoing products; it's about building real solutions that work at scale.

This role would suit a technical professional who thrives at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You're equally comfortable debugging SIP traces as you are standing up a LiteLLM gateway with routing and failover across a customer's model providers, or leading a whiteboard session with a customer's engineering team. The ability to own outcomes from POC to production go-live is essential.

Saudi customers increasingly require Arabic-first conversational AI and in-Kingdom data residency, so a large part of this job is making open-weight models perform in production on infrastructure the customer controls. This is a customer-facing role conducted largely in Arabic — fluent spoken Gulf Arabic is a hard requirement.

This is a Riyadh-based role with 10–30% travel to customer sites for deployments, workshops, and escalations — primarily across the Kingdom (Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam/Khobar, NEOM) with occasional travel elsewhere in the GCC.

• Embed with enterprise and government customers to understand their communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges firsthand
• Build and deploy custom implementations: AI Voice Assistants, Telnyx APIs (Voice, Messaging, Fax, Wireless), 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: a unified OpenAI-compatible interface across self-hosted open-weight models and hosted providers, with routing, load balancing, retries and fallbacks, rate limits, and per-team virtual keys
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Lead POCs, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard to go-live
• Own customer outcomes — stay engaged until the solution is live and stable
• Collaborate directly with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap based on field insights from the Saudi and wider MENA market
• Create clear technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoff, in English and where needed in Arabic
• 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)

• CS degree or equivalent experience
• 3+ years building software or doing technical consulting
• Proficiency in multiple languages: Python, Node.js, Go — you're more dangerous in some than others
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Exposure to SIP, WebRTC, or real-time voice/messaging systems
• Ability to translate "it's not working" into root cause
• Comfortable working on customer sites and in high-stakes technical conversations
• Fluent spoken Gulf Arabic (Khaleeji) — required, not preferred. You'll 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
• Based in Riyadh, or willing to relocate — this is a hybrid role with travel
• Legally authorized to work in Saudi Arabia, or eligible for sponsorship

• Experience with AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems — especially Arabic ASR and speech synthesis
• Fine-tuning and post-training experience: LoRA/QLoRA, distillation, preference tuning, or building eval sets for a specific domain
• Familiarity with the Arabic open-weight model landscape and the trade-offs between Arabic-first and multilingual models
• Experience with an inference serving engine behind the gateway (vLLM, SGLang, TGI, Ollama) and sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models
• SQL proficiency (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle)
• ETL and data wrangling experience
• DevOps fundamentals (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD)
• Background in telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS
• Experience with in-Kingdom sovereign or on-prem cloud deployments and PDPL-aligned architectures
• Security mindset (IAM, encryption, audit logging)