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: youll 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 ownershipand youll 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 youll do

Own 13 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 well screen for)

• 0.52 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 12 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.