Forward Deployed Engineer (Voice AI)

About the role

Voice AI agents holding thousands of live conversations a day, in production with national-scale enterprise customers.

A forward deployed function being built out from a handful of people; you’ll still be very early and help shape the function and product.

Our client builds voice AI agents that run structured, high-volume conversations for large enterprise customers. They have gone from zero calls to several thousand a day, and they are now onboarding customers faster than the founders can personally implement them.

Until recently, every implementation has been driven by a co-founder and the customer success lead. They are building a forward deployed engineering function to own it instead - requirements through to a live, monitored, continuously improving deployment. They’re hiring 3-4 FDEs into it.

What You'll Be Doing

Own the post-sale cycle end to end: gather requirements from the customer, define what gets built, drive it to go-live, then keep making it better

Build, deploy and tune conversational AI agents using internal tooling - Python and agentic pipelines, plus a JavaScript stack you will end up contributing to

Get deep on each customer's workflows and objectives until you know exactly what good looks like for them, then design the agent and the evaluation around it

Monitor agent performance in production, find the failure patterns, and ship improvements off the back of real customer feedback

Work directly with the engineering team to spot the capabilities worth building into the core product rather than rebuilding account by account

Own the relationship after go-live - the technical contact customers trust, and the person who grows the account

Shape how the function runs: the implementation playbook, the process, the standards. The team is small enough that what you build sticks

What You'll Need

Essential

4-6 years total, with at least two years in a customer-facing engineering role - forward deployed, solutions engineering or applied AI - and two shipping production software as a full-stack engineer

Strong Python: APIs, data pipelines, eval harnesses, testing frameworks. Working JavaScript alongside it

You have built and scaled agentic workflows in production, not prototypes - orchestration, prompting, evaluation, the operational side of keeping them running

Genuinely client-facing: you can run technical discovery, translate a messy business requirement into a build, and carry it through to production yourself

Startup experience. A big tech background only works if it sits alongside time somewhere scrappy and early

A technical degree - computer science, engineering, maths or similar

Bonus

Voice or conversational AI, especially real-time or high-volume environments

You have been inside a company through a genuine step change in scale and know what breaks

A track record of turning recurring custom work into core product

The Person

You want your work live, in front of customers, and improving. You are driven by outcomes rather than tickets closed, and you are ambitious enough to want the upside that comes with getting a function off the ground properly. You communicate well - with engineers, with customers, and with a founder who wants the honest version. You are comfortable defining the problem as you go, because there is no playbook here yet. And you have seen enough scale to know the difference between a demo that works and a system that holds.

The Role

Full-time, New York City - four days a week in the office

$150,000 - $220,000 base, plus equity

No travel requirement. Customers are largely US-based, but implementations are run from the office

You will report to a hands-on technical leader and meet a co-founder during the process. The team is a few people today and growing to four or five, with one more joining shortly