Forward Deployed Engineer III
First seen by Alion on Sep 25, 2026.
About Exotel :
Exotel is India's leading AI-first cloud communications platform, powering over 25 billion customer conversations annually for 6,000+ enterprises across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
From voice and contact centres to AI-powered customer engagement, Exotel enables businesses to build reliable, scalable, and intelligent customer experiences.
About the Role :
You will be the senior technical voice in Voicebot Delivery: setting the standards others build to, taking on the hardest and most novel builds, and shaping what gets productised rather than rebuilt for each customer.
What You'll Do :
Solution Architecture and Delivery :
- Own the most complex and novel voicebot builds, and set the technical approach others follow.
- Act as design authority on solution and integration architecture across the customer's communication stack, and make the feasibility call at scoping.
- Be the technical voice in front of enterprise customers and in escalations.
LLM and Platform Engineering :
- Set the prompt patterns, evaluation standards and guardrails the team builds to.
- Own the architecture of LLM-backed conversation systems: orchestration, retrieval, tool use, latency and failure behaviour.
- Build the connectors, test suites, accelerators and tooling the whole team reuses.
Technical Leadership :
- Shape the product and engineering roadmaps - turn recurring patterns into platform work rather than repeated bespoke builds.
- Partner with Product and Engineering on customer-specific enhancements and on resolving escalations.
- Grow FDE I and FDE II engineers into independent owners.
What We're Looking For :
Experience :
- 5+ years, with significant time in a hands-on engineering or forward-deployed role.
- A track record of building reusable tooling and accelerators, not only of delivering projects.
- Experience leading enterprise implementations end to end.
Technical Expertise :
- Strong software engineering background with hands-on coding in Python and/or TypeScript.
- Experience with LLM application architecture: orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, agents and tool calling, evaluation and guardrails.
- Able to architect integrations against any customer communication stack - ticketing, CRM, marketing automation, deflection and contact centre systems.
- Deep debugging ability across distributed systems, APIs and real-time voice or telephony.
- Working knowledge of cloud platforms, Linux, SQL and networking fundamentals.
Customer and Leadership Skills :
- Credible with engineering teams and with enterprise customers alike.
- Strong stakeholder management and escalation handling.
- Able to mentor engineers and raise the technical bar of a team without owning it on paper.
Education :
- Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or an equivalent computer-related degree.
Good to Have :
- Experience with LLM application or multi-agent frameworks.
- Contact centre platforms, SIP, VoIP or WebRTC.
- Experience influencing a product roadmap from the field.
- Exposure to conversational AI platforms in the market.
Skills
Bot Integration, LLM, Python, TypeScript, Distributed Systems, Contact Center Analytics, WebRTC, Forward Deployment Engineering