Telnyx

Cloud-based voice, messaging, and wireless services

Forward Deployed Engineer

AI Application Engineering +1Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Full-timeHong KongNo salary listed

About the Job

Requirements

A Computer Science degree or equivalent experience is required.
At least 3 years of experience building and shipping production software is required, including writing code used by real users, being on call, and debugging production issues; consulting experience qualifies if these conditions are met.
Proficiency in multiple programming languages among Python, Node.js/TypeScript, and Go is required; TypeScript is used for Telnyx Edge Compute functions and stateful actors.
Practical understanding of production model failure modes, including provider rate limits and quotas, timeout and retry behavior, streaming, token accounting and cost attribution, and concurrency-related failures.
Experience deploying containerized services on Kubernetes, including secrets management, configuration, and upgrades.
Experience wiring observability using Prometheus and Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or equivalent, including defining monitoring, alerts, and healthy service indicators.
High-concurrency experience with Kafka, message queues, or event streams at scale, including understanding 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 thinking and cloud-native instincts are required.
Exposure to SIP, WebRTC, or real-time voice or messaging systems is required.
Ability to work independently, read code and documentation, consult customers, and make sound engineering judgments without an engineering team behind the role.
Customer-facing engineering experience, including leading discovery with customer engineers and presenting to executives.
Ability to diagnose root causes from reports that something is not working.
Comfort working at customer sites and participating in high-stakes technical conversations.
Excellent written and verbal communication in English and Chinese (Cantonese and/or Mandarin), including whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and escalations with customer engineering teams.
Must be based in Hong Kong or willing to relocate, and legally authorized to work in Hong Kong or eligible for sponsorship.

Responsibilities

Embed with enterprise customers to understand communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges firsthand.
Build and deploy custom implementations, including AI Voice Assistants, Telnyx APIs for Voice, Messaging, Fax, and Wireless, and WebRTC.
Run open-weight LLMs in customer environments through Telnyx Inference using GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen, and MiniMax via an OpenAI-compatible API, or deploy self-hosted stacks such as Llama, Mistral, CKIP-LLO, FlagAlpha, or other Cantonese- or Chinese-language sovereign models behind a serving engine when air-gapped or sovereign-cloud requirements demand it.
Deploy and operate LiteLLM as a model gateway in customer environments, providing 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 using cost tracking and budgets, caching, logging and observability such as OpenTelemetry or Langfuse, and guardrails so customers can monitor and control AI workloads.
Implement production observability for shipped systems, including metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, ELK, or the customer's existing stack.
Design model-routing strategies for real-time voice workloads that balance latency, cost, and quality and provide fallback behavior when a provider degrades.
Make build-versus-buy recommendations for self-hosted open-weight models versus hosted frontier APIs and keep customer application code portable across both.
Adapt models to customer domains by building prompt and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and evaluation harnesses for English, Cantonese, and Mandarin use cases and Hong Kong/APAC regulatory environments, including PDPO, data localization, and Mainland China cross-border data transfer.
Lead proofs of concept, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard through go-live.
Stay engaged until customer solutions are live and stable, and own customer outcomes.
Collaborate directly with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap based on field insights from Hong Kong and the broader Greater China/APAC region.
Create clear technical documentation and runbooks, and maintain solutions for handoff.
Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues alongside customer teams.

Desired Qualifications

Experience with AI voice assistants, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or LLM-based conversational systems.
Experience building evaluation sets for a specific domain.
Hands-on 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 and the trade-offs between regional and multilingual models, including Cantonese/Chinese-language models and Greater China sovereign AI initiatives.
Experience with an inference serving engine behind a gateway, such as vLLM, SGLang, or TGI for production serving, or Ollama for lightweight on-premises deployments, and sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models based on KV-cache footprint, concurrent batch size, and context length against VRAM.
SQL proficiency with Postgres, MySQL, or Oracle.
ETL and data-wrangling experience.
CI/CD pipeline design and automation.
Background in telecommunications, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS.
Experience with sovereign or on-premises cloud deployments and Hong Kong/APAC regulatory frameworks, including PDPO, Hong Kong data localization, Mainland China PIPL and CSL cross-border data transfer requirements, Office of the Government Chief Information Officer cloud guidelines, or APAC cross-border data transfer frameworks.
Security mindset covering 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 Hong Kong — 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 CKIP-LLO, FlagAlpha, or other Cantonese/Chinese-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 English, Cantonese, and Mandarin language use cases and Hong Kong/APAC-specific regulatory environments (PDPO, data localization, Mainland China cross-border data transfer)
• 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 Hong Kong and the broader Greater China/APAC region

• 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 Chinese (Cantonese and/or Mandarin). You can run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and escalations with customer engineering teams.
• Based in Hong Kong, or willing to relocate — this is a hybrid role with travel across Hong Kong and the broader Greater China/APAC region
• Legally authorized to work in Hong Kong, 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 Cantonese/Chinese-language models and Greater China sovereign AI initiatives
• 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 Hong Kong/APAC regulatory frameworks (PDPO, Hong Kong data localization, Mainland China PIPL and CSL cross-border data transfer requirements, Office of the Government Chief Information Officer cloud guidelines, APAC cross-border data transfer frameworks)

• 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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