Telnyx - Forward Deployed Engineer, Southern Europe

• Create clear technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoff• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues alongside customer teamsWhat 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 sponsorshipBonus 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)