Telnyx

Cloud-based voice, messaging, and wireless services

Forward Deployed Engineer

AI Application EngineeringConfirmed live in the last 24 hours

Full-timeMilan, Metropolitan City of Milan, ItalyNo 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/TypeScript, and Go.
Practical understanding of production model issues such as provider rate limits and quotas, timeout and retry behavior, streaming, token accounting and cost attribution, and concurrency failure modes.
Experience deploying containerized services on Kubernetes, including secrets management, configuration, and upgrades.
Experience implementing observability with Prometheus and Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or equivalent tools.
High-concurrency experience with Kafka, message queues, or event streams at scale, 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, read code and documentation, and make sound engineering judgments without an engineering team supporting the role.
Customer-facing engineering experience, including technical discovery with customer engineers and presentations to executives.
Ability to translate reported technical failures into root causes.
Ability to work on customer sites and participate in high-stakes technical conversations.
Excellent written and verbal communication in English and Italian.
Based in Milan or willing to relocate.
Legally authorized to work in Italy 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 application programming interfaces for Voice, Messaging, Fax, and Wireless, and WebRTC.
Run open-weight large 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 with routing, load balancing, retries and fallbacks, rate limits, and per-team virtual keys.
Instrument and govern large language model usage through the gateway with cost tracking, budgets, caching, logging, observability, and guardrails.
Implement production observability for deployed systems using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting.
Design model-routing strategies for real-time voice workloads, balancing latency, cost, and quality with fallback behavior.
Evaluate self-hosted open-weight models against hosted frontier application programming interfaces and keep customer application code portable across both.
Adapt models to customer domains through prompt and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and evaluation harnesses for Italian, Spanish, Greek, and English use cases.
Lead proofs of concept, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard 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 Italy, Spain, and Greece.
Create technical documentation and runbooks and maintain solutions for handoff.
Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues alongside customer teams.

Desired Qualifications

Experience with artificial intelligence voice assistants, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or large-language-model conversational systems.
Experience building evaluation sets for a specific domain.
Production experience with an large language model 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 and trade-offs between regional and multilingual models, including European sovereign artificial intelligence initiatives.
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 extract, transform, and load processes 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 European regulatory frameworks, including GDPR, the EU AI Act, the Italian GDPR/Privacy Code, Spanish LOPDGDD, Greek GDPR implementation, and Schrems II implications.
Security experience with 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 Milan — 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 Italica, Sosso, or other Italian/European 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 Italian, Spanish, Greek, and English language use cases and EU-specific regulatory environments (GDPR, EU AI Act, Italian data protection, Spanish data protection, Greek data protection)
• 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 Italy, Spain, and Greece

• 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 Italian. You can run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and escalations with customer engineering teams.
• Based in Milan, or willing to relocate — this is a hybrid role with travel across Italy, Spain, and Greece
• Legally authorized to work in Italy, 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 EU sovereign AI initiatives (Mistral, Aleph Alpha, Italian models like Italica/Sosso, and other European LLM projects)
• 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 EU regulatory frameworks (GDPR, EU AI Act, Italian GDPR/Privacy Code, Spanish LOPDGDD, Greek GDPR implementation, Schrems II implications)
• 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

Recently Posted Jobs

Explore more opportunities at Telnyx

See more jobs