Forward Deployed Engineer, Brazil

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 edgetechnology 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 looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our LATAM team, with a focus on São Paulo. In this remote, customer-facing role, you'll embed directly with enterprise customers across the region to architect and ship production systems on Telnyx's global network - voice, messaging, AI, and wireless - including self-hosted, open-weight LLM deployments that run inside customer environments. This isn't about demoing products; it's about building real solutions that work at scale.

This role would suit a technical professional who thrives at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You're equally comfortable debugging SIP traces as you are standing up a LiteLLM gateway with routing and failover across a customer's model providers, or leading a whiteboard session with a customer's engineering team. The ability to own outcomes from POC to production go-live is essential.

Customers across Latin America increasingly need Spanish- and Portuguese-first conversational AI, regional data residency, and flexible deployment options. A significant part of this job is making open-weight models perform reliably on infrastructure the customer controls. Professional fluency in Spanish or Portuguese, together with strong working proficiency in English, is required.

This is a LATAM-based remote role for candidates located in São Paulo, with approximately 10-30% travel for deployments, workshops, and escalations across Brazil, and the wider region.

Responsibilities

• 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), and WebRTC
• Deploy and operate open-weight LLMs such as Llama, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, and gpt-oss in customer-controlled cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped environments
• Deploy and operate LiteLLM as the model gateway in customer environments, providing a unified OpenAI-compatible interface across self-hosted models and hosted providers, with routing, load balancing, retries and fallbacks, rate limits, and per-team virtual keys
• Instrument and govern LLM usage through cost tracking and budgets, caching, logging and observability using OpenTelemetry, Langfuse, or similar tools, and guardrails
• Design model-routing strategies for real-time voice workloads, balancing latency, cost, reliability, and Spanish- or Portuguese-language quality
• Make the build-vs-buy case between self-hosted open-weight models and hosted frontier APIs, while keeping customer application code portable across both
• Adapt models to customer domains through prompt and RAG pipelines, LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning, and evaluation harnesses for Spanish, Portuguese, and multilingual use cases
• Lead POCs, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard to go-live
• Own customer outcomes and remain engaged until the solution is live and stable
• Collaborate directly with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap based on field insights from the Latin American market
• Create clear technical documentation, runbooks, and maintainable solutions for handoff in English and, where needed, Spanish or Portuguese
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex integration issues alongside customer teams
• Help customers address applicable privacy, security, telecommunications, and data-residency requirements; including Brazil's LGPD

What We Are Looking For

• CS degree or equivalent experience
• 3+ years building software or doing technical consulting
• Proficiency in multiple languages such as Python, Node.js, and Go - you're more dangerous in some than others
• Hands-on experience running LiteLLM or a comparable LLM gateway such as Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, or an in-house proxy in production, including model definitions, proxy configuration, routing and fallback rules, and virtual key management
• Practical understanding of production model-gateway challenges: provider rate limits and quotas, timeouts and retries, streaming, token accounting and cost attribution, and concurrency-related failure modes
• Comfort deploying containerized services on Kubernetes, with secrets management, configuration, observability, and upgrades as part of the deployment story
• Strong API fluency, event-driven thinking, and cloud-native instincts
• Exposure to SIP, WebRTC, VoIP, or real-time voice and messaging systems
• Ability to translate “it's not working” into root cause
• Comfort working directly with customers and participating in high-stakes technical conversations
• Professional fluency in Spanish or Portuguese
• Professional working proficiency in English for internal collaboration, documentation, and work with Product and Engineering
• Based in or near Bogotá, Mexico City, or São Paulo, with authorization to work in the applicable country
• Willingness to travel approximately 10-30% across Latin America

Bonus Points For

• Professional proficiency in both Spanish and Portuguese
• Experience with AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems, particularly for Latin American Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese
• Fine-tuning and post-training experience: LoRA/QLoRA, distillation, preference tuning, or building evaluation sets for a specific domain
• Experience with an inference-serving engine behind the gateway such as vLLM, SGLang, TGI, or Ollama, including sizing GPU capacity for self-hosted models
• SQL proficiency with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle
• ETL and data-wrangling experience
• DevOps fundamentals including Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD
• Background in telecom, CPaaS, contact centers, or high-growth SaaS
• Experience designing private-cloud, sovereign-cloud, on-premises, or data-residency-sensitive architectures
• Security mindset, including IAM, encryption, secrets management, and audit logging

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