Telnyx

Cloud-based voice, messaging, and wireless services

Forward Deployed Engineer - UAE

AI Application EngineeringConfirmed live in the last 24 hours

Full-timeDubai - United Arab EmiratesNo salary listed

About the Job

Requirements

A Computer Science degree or equivalent experience.
At least 3 years of experience building and shipping production software, including writing code used by real users, being on call, and debugging production failures.
Proficiency in multiple programming languages, including Python, Node.js or TypeScript, and Go.
Practical understanding of production model concerns including provider rate limits and quotas, timeout and retry behavior, streaming, token accounting, cost attribution, and concurrency failure modes.
Experience deploying containerized services on Kubernetes, including secrets management, configuration, and upgrades.
Experience implementing observability using Prometheus and Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or equivalent tools.
High-concurrency experience with Kafka, message queues, or event streams, including consumer lag, backpressure, hot partitions, rebalance stalls, partitioning, consumer groups, and parallelism.
Experience building APIs from scratch, including OpenAPI specifications, REST or GraphQL design, authentication, rate limiting, versioning, and idempotency.
Event-driven and cloud-native engineering experience.
Exposure to SIP, WebRTC, or real-time voice and messaging systems.
Ability to work independently and make sound engineering decisions without relying on an engineering team or manager.
Customer-facing engineering experience, including technical discovery with customer engineers and presentations to executives.
Ability to diagnose root causes from reported issues.
Willingness to work on customer sites and participate in high-stakes technical conversations.
Excellent written and verbal communication in English and Arabic.
Based in Dubai or willing to relocate.
Legally authorized to work in the United Arab Emirates or eligible for sponsorship.

Responsibilities

Embed with enterprise customers to understand their communications workflows, artificial intelligence use cases, and integration challenges.
Build and deploy custom implementations including artificial intelligence voice assistants, Telnyx Voice, Messaging, Fax, and Wireless APIs, and WebRTC.
Run open-weight language models in customer environments through Telnyx Inference or deploy self-hosted model stacks when air-gapped or sovereign-cloud requirements demand it.
Deploy and operate LiteLLM as a model gateway in customer environments, including routing, load balancing, retries, fallbacks, rate limits, and per-team virtual keys.
Instrument and govern language-model usage through the gateway using cost tracking, budgets, caching, logging, observability, and guardrails.
Implement production observability for shipped systems using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting.
Design model-routing strategies for real-time voice workloads that balance latency, cost, and quality and provide fallback behavior.
Evaluate self-hosted open-weight models against hosted frontier APIs and keep customer application code portable across both.
Adapt models to customer domains using prompt and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and evaluation harnesses for Arabic and English use cases and UAE/GCC regulatory environments.
Lead proofs of concept, pilots, and production launches from initial design through go-live.
Own customer outcomes until solutions are live and stable.
Collaborate with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap using field insights from the UAE and broader GCC.
Create technical documentation and runbooks and maintain solutions for handoff.
Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues with customer teams.

Desired Qualifications

Experience with artificial intelligence voice assistants, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or language-model conversational systems.
Experience building evaluation sets for a specific domain.
Production experience with an LLM gateway such as LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, or an in-house OpenAI-compatible proxy, including configuration-driven model definitions, routing and fallback rules, and virtual key management.
Familiarity with open-weight models, regional and multilingual model trade-offs, Arabic-language models such as Jais, ALLaM, and Fanar, and sovereign AI initiatives in the GCC.
Experience with inference-serving engines such as vLLM, SGLang, TGI, or Ollama and sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models.
SQL proficiency with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle.
Experience with ETL and data wrangling.
Experience designing and automating continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.
Background in telecommunications, communications-platform-as-a-service, or high-growth software as a service.
Experience with sovereign or on-premises cloud deployments and UAE/GCC regulatory frameworks, including UAE PDPL, Dubai Data Law, TDRA cloud regulations, GCC data sovereignty requirements, and free-zone IT environments.
Security experience involving identity and access management, encryption, and audit logging.

About Telnyx

Telnyx is an industry leader that's not just imagining the future of global connectivity—we're building it. From architecting and amplifying the reach of a private, global, multi-cloud IP network, to bringing hyperlocal edge technology right to your fingertips through intuitive APIs, we're shaping a new era of seamless interconnection between people, devices, and applications.

We're driven by a desire to transform and modernize what's antiquated, automate the manual, and solve real-world problems through innovative connectivity solutions. As a testament to our success, we're proud to stand as a financially stable and profitable company. Our robust profitability allows us not only to invest in pioneering technologies but also to foster an environment of continuous learning and growth for our team.

Our collective vision is a world where borderless connectivity fuels limitless innovation. By joining us, you can be part of laying the foundations for this interconnected future. We're currently seeking passionate individuals who are excited about the opportunity to contribute to an industry-shaping company while growing their own skills and careers.

The Role

We're building a local Enterprise Sales Pod in Dubai — one AE and one Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), working together to build a Telnyx enterprise business in your market. You'll embed directly with enterprise customers to architect and ship production systems on Telnyx's global network — voice, messaging, AI, and wireless.

This isn't about demoing products. It's about building real solutions that work at scale.

You'll work side-by-side with a dedicated Enterprise AE — not a demo resource, but a commercial partner who owns the named-account list, builds executive relationships, and closes the deal. You own the technical side: discovery, architecture, POC, and production go-live. You win together. No throw-over-the-wall.

The Pod Model

Enterprise AE — owns the named-account list, builds executive relationships, gets in the room, owns commercial qualification and close, expands the account.

Forward Deployed Engineer — owns technical discovery, designs the architecture, builds the POC when gated, gets the first workload live, removes blockers and finds the next workload.

We sell the workload, not the SKU. Customers buy a production outcome — an AI contact center, a SOC/NOC agent, global communications, connected mobility, or enterprise inference — that runs on Telnyx primitives (voice, messaging, numbers, wireless, Voice AI, inference, agents, connectivity). You lead with the outcome conversation, not a product menu.

What You'll Do

• Embed with enterprise 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
• Run open-weight LLMs in customer environments — consume GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen, and MiniMax through Telnyx Inference (OpenAI-compatible API; there's no model infrastructure for you to run), or deploy self-hosted stacks (Llama, Mistral, and region-specific models like Jais, Fanar, or other Arabic-language sovereign models) behind your own serving engine when air-gapped or sovereign-cloud requirements demand it
• 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
• Wire production observability for everything you ship — metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting (e.g. Prometheus + Grafana for metrics, OpenTelemetry for traces, Graylog or ELK for logs — or the customer's existing stack) — so you and the customer's ops team both know what "healthy" looks like and what pages whom when it isn't
• Design model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads, balancing latency, cost, and quality, 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 and evaluation harnesses for Arabic and English language use cases and UAE/GCC-specific regulatory environments (UAE PDPL, Dubai data sovereignty, cloud localization requirements)
• 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 UAE and the broader GCC
• Create clear technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoff

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues alongside customer teams

What We're Looking For

• CS degree or equivalent experience
• 3+ years building and shipping production software — you've written code that real users depended on, you've been on-call for it, and you've debugged it when things broke. (A consulting background counts if this is also true of you.)
• Proficiency in multiple languages: Python, Node.js/TypeScript, Go — you're more dangerous in some than others. (Telnyx Edge Compute — functions and stateful actors — is TypeScript, so that one pulls double duty.)
• 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
• You've wired observability and been paged because of it — Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or equivalent. You know what to monitor, what to alert on, and what "healthy" looks like
• High-concurrency experience — Kafka, message queues, or event streams at real scale. When throughput spikes you know what breaks — consumer lag, backpressure, hot partitions, rebalance stalls — and what absorbs it: partitioning, consumer groups, parallelism up to your partition count
• You've built APIs from scratch, not just consumed them — OpenAPI spec, REST/GraphQL design, auth, rate limiting, versioning, idempotency
• Event-driven thinking and cloud-native instincts
• Exposure to SIP, WebRTC, or real-time voice/messaging systems
• Self-sufficient by default — there's no engineering team behind you. You read the code and the docs, ask the customer (not your manager), and make sound engineering judgment calls on your own
• Customer-facing engineering experience — you can run discovery with a customer's engineers and present to their executives in the same week
• Ability to translate "it's not working" into root cause
• Comfortable working on customer sites and in high-stakes technical conversations
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English and Arabic. You can run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and escalations with customer engineering teams.
• Based in Dubai, or willing to relocate — this is a hybrid role with travel across the UAE and broader GCC
• Legally authorized to work in the UAE, or eligible for sponsorship

Bonus Points For

• Experience with AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems
• Building eval sets for a specific domain
• Hands-on production experience with an LLM gateway — LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, or an in-house OpenAI-compatible proxy — including config-driven model definitions, routing and fallback rules, and virtual key management
• Familiarity with the open-weight model landscape and the trade-offs between regional and multilingual models, including Arabic-language models (Jais, ALLaM, Fanar) and sovereign AI initiatives in the GCC
• Experience with an inference serving engine behind the gateway — vLLM, SGLang, or TGI for production serving; Ollama for lightweight on-prem — and sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models (KV-cache footprint, concurrent batch size, and context length against VRAM)
• SQL proficiency (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle)
• ETL and data wrangling experience
• CI/CD pipeline design and automation
• Background in telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS
• Experience with sovereign or on-prem cloud deployments and UAE/GCC regulatory frameworks (UAE PDPL, Dubai Data Law, TDRA cloud regulations, GCC data sovereignty requirements, free zone IT environments like DIFC, Dubai Internet City)
• Security mindset (IAM, encryption, audit logging)

#LI-RH1

About the Company

Telnyx

Cloud-based voice, messaging, and wireless services

Telnyx provides cloud-based communication services for businesses, including voice, messaging, wireless, and fax, accessed through its Mission Control Portal. It operates on a pay-as-you-go model where customers are billed for usage such as calls, texts, and data. The company differentiates itself by owning and operating a global IP network, which improves performance, reliability, and security, along with extensive support resources for customers. Its goal is to enable businesses of all sizes to communicate reliably and securely over the internet through scalable, usage-based services.

Company size: 201-500
Company stage: Seed
Total funding: $1M
Headquarters: Austin, TX
Founded: 2009

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