Forward Deployed Engineer, GCC

The Role

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our team in Riyadh or Dubai. In this 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 or Dubai-based 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.

Responsibilities

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)

What We Are Looking For

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

Bonus Points For

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)

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