Internal Deployed Engineer

The mandate: Build the AI systems and automations that run Retell internally — recruiting, sales, finance, operations, and customer support — working directly with the founders and every team in the company. The title is doing something specific. "Internal Deployed Engineer" borrows the Forward Deployed Engineer framing and points it inward: your customers are Retell's own teams. You sit with recruiting to understand their screening problem, build the system, deploy it, and iterate on it — the same loop an FDE runs with an enterprise client, except the feedback comes from down the hall.

"This is not a narrowly scoped role, it is a high-ownership builder position."

What You'll Own

HR and recruiting AI

• Structured signal extraction from résumés — skills, experience, founder traits, domain expertise
• Lead scoring models predicting interview success and role fit
• AI recruiter workflows for screening and qualification
• Personalized outbound and candidate engagement automation

Security and compliance

• Automation for BAAs, DPAs, DocuSign, and contract review flows
• Security questionnaire and compliance response generation
• Internal tooling for enterprise readiness and audit

Operational infrastructure

• Accounts receivable automation and finance email workflows
• Automated enterprise onboarding and account setup
• Systems that cut manual overhead across teams

Integrations and platform

• Salesforce, HubSpot, GoHighLevel
• Zapier, n8n, Make
• LLM systems on OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, and others
• API integrations connecting internal systems

GTM engineering

• HubSpot and Lark automations for sales and marketing efficiency
• Lifecycle automation for engagement and retention
• Website personalization and ad content generation
• Email personalization and outbound pipelines at scale

Requirements

Hard gates:

• Bachelor's in CS, CE, or a closely related technical field. Same firm phrasing as the sibling reqs, no equivalent-experience clause.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals — backend, full-stack, or systems. The 90-minute coding round is the real gate.
• Demonstrated exceptional ability through internships, startup experience, research, or meaningful side projects. This substitutes for years.
• Redwood City (confirm on-site status)

Profile:

• 0–1 years experience explicitly welcomed. Also open to more — nothing here excludes a 3–5 year engineer.
• Founder mindset, ownership from day one
• Enjoys solving business and operational problems with technology
• Wants to work across engineering, product, recruiting, sales, and ops
• Prefers end-to-end systems over defined tasks
• Moves fast, learns fast, thrives in ambiguity

Strong bonuses:

• LLM, AI agent, or modern AI tooling experience — a plus here rather than a requirement, which is the key difference from the AI Agents req
• A shipped side project with real users. The single highest-signal item for a 0–1 year candidate — it substitutes for professional experience better than any internship.
• Hackathon wins, especially AI or agent-focused
• Competitive programming or strong CS competition results
• Research experience with a shipped artifact
• Prior startup internship, especially at a company under 50 people
• Open-source contributions with real usage
• Built something that automated a real process for a real organization — a club, a lab, a small business

Location and visa:

• Redwood City
• Sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, TN, L-1, E-3, F-1 (OPT/CPT), and O-1. F-1 OPT/CPT matters enormously here — this is a new-grad-eligible role at a company that sponsors, which most of the international CS graduating class cannot find.

Anti-patterns

• Candidates who need structure, mentorship, or a defined onboarding ramp. There isn't one.
• Strong interviewers with nothing built — the project deep dives happen twice and there's nowhere to hide
• Anyone who'd rather be on the core product team. This is internal systems; if it reads as second-tier to them, they'll be unhappy.
• No-code operators — the 90-minute coding round is the filter
• Big-company internship pedigree with no independent building
• Candidates optimizing for résumé brand over scope
• Remote requirements

Who Will Thrive Here

Someone who's been building things nobody asked them to build since they were seventeen. They have a side project with real users, they taught themselves whatever they needed, and they'd rather own a system the whole company uses than be the junior engineer on a large team. They're comfortable being told "figure it out" and are not put off by working on recruiting or invoicing — they see it as a problem with an owner attached, which is more than most engineers their age get for a decade.