Forward Deployed Engineer - 1

About Exotel

 Exotel is a leading provider of AI transformation to enterprises for customer engagement and experience. With over 20 billion annual conversations across Omni channel, voice, agents and bots,  Exotel is trusted by more than 7000 clients worldwide, spanning industries such as BFSI, Logistics, Consumer Durables, E-commerce, Healthcare and Education.

Customer expectations are evolving and businesses face the challenge of balancing the need for increased revenue, optimized costs, and exceptional customer experience (CX). Exotel steps forward as your transformative partner, offering an AI-powered communication solution to address all three!

Location: Bengaluru(Preferred) / Remote-India
Team: Voice AI / House of AI (Delivery + Productization)
Type: Full-time

Why this role exists

At Exotel, Forward Deployed Engineers are “builders close to customers”: you’ll take a signed customer from contract → production voicebot go-live, and then iterate until business outcomes move. The work is equal parts systems + product thinking + customer ownership—and you’ll continuously turn one-off solutions into reusable recipes/templates for the broader FDE org.

This mirrors how top AI companies define FDE success: own discovery/scoping, system design, build, rollout, adoption, and codify playbooks.

What you’ll do

Own 1–3 customer deployments like micro product launches

• Run technical discovery, map business goals → agent workflows, define success metrics (containment, latency, resolution, conversion).

• Ship production go-lives in a clear timebox (weeks, not months), and keep improving post-launch using evals + A/B tests.

Build AI agent systems end-to-end (not just configs)

• Design prompt + tool orchestration (function calling), multi-step workflows, and multi-agent patterns (router/supervisor, planner-executor, guardrails, memory, retrieval).

• Implement integrations: APIs, webhooks, DB reads/writes, CRMs, ticketing/loan/core systems, custom middleware scripts.

• Partner with core engineering to push improvements into platform (so the next deployment becomes easier).

Make the team scale

• Convert learnings into templates, reusable components, and a deployment playbook (checklists, monitoring dashboards, eval harnesses, fallback taxonomy, runbooks). 

Must-have skills / experience (what we’ll screen for)

• 0.5–2 years building AI apps or strong backend/integration work with clear evidence of shipped projects.

• Hands-on with prompting + conversational flow design (tool use, reliability, edge cases, safety, fallbacks).

• Understanding of agentic / multi-agent architecture and common design patterns (routing, delegation, memory, retries, guardrails, evaluation loops).

• Comfortable coding in Python (preferred) and/or TypeScript/Node; strong fundamentals in APIs, JSON, auth, debugging.

• Ability to thrive in ambiguity: you can turn messy customer requirements into crisp scopes and deliver in iterations. (This is a core FDE trait.)

Bonus points

• Side projects: voice agents, RAG apps, evaluation tooling, copilots, OSS contributions.

• Familiarity with ASR/TTS, audio/voice pipelines, telephony/contact-center concepts (latency budgets, barge-in, transfers, DTMF).

• Experience with cloud/devops basics (Docker, monitoring, logs, incident hygiene). Exotel generally values “you built it, you own it” ownership.

What success looks like

In the first ~90 days, you should be able to:

• Independently ship at least one production go-live and demonstrate measurable movement on 1–2 metrics (containment, AHT, conversion, cost/min, fallback rate).

• Produce at least 2 reusable artifacts (prompt templates, integration connectors, eval packs, dashboards/runbooks) that reduce future delivery time.