Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

The mandate: Embed with enterprise customers and ship production voice AI systems inside their environment. You write the integration code, you design the architecture, you present it to their stakeholders, and you own whether it works in production.

This is the Palantir FDE job applied to voice AI, and unlike Retell's Deployment Strategist and Agent PM reqs, this one is genuinely an engineering role. The interview loop proves it — live coding on CoderPad, an architecture case, and a full-stack build under constraints. Anyone who can't code will not survive round two. Recruiters should not source this from the same pool as the other two Retell searches.

What You'll Own

• End-to-end delivery on the Retell voice agent platform, prototype through production
• Full-stack integrations in Python and JavaScript against enterprise systems — CRMs, ERPs, scheduling tools
• Deep expertise in voice AI system design and LLM prompting, to the point of being the internal go-to
• Pre-sales partnership with Sales: requirements gathering, prototype demos, system design presentations
• Project scoping, blocker resolution, and concise status communication across teams
• Reusable patterns codified into internal tools and platform components
• Field feedback translated into product and GTM recommendations

Requirements

Hard gates:

• On-site in the Bay Area
• Writes production-grade code. Python, JavaScript, or equivalent. The loop is a live coding screen plus a full-stack build. Non-negotiable.
• 2+ years in a customer-facing technical role — Solutions Engineer, Technical PM, Customer Success/Support Engineer, or ex-founder
• Can explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and hold a room

Profile:

• 4–8 years total engineering experience, senior enough to design a production system alone
• Has delivered systems in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where the spec didn't exist yet
• Understands LLM-powered systems and how model behavior shows up in user experience
• Manages risk proactively rather than escalating it

Strong bonuses:

• Prior forward-deployed or embedded engineering at Palantir, Scale, or similar
• Enterprise integration depth — Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite, SAP, Epic, ServiceNow, Zendesk APIs
• Voice, telephony, or real-time systems experience (Twilio, WebRTC, SIP, latency-sensitive pipelines)
• Contact center / CCaaS domain knowledge
• Ex-founder — explicitly named in the JD and a strong signal here

Location and visa:

• On-site, Bay Area
• Sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, TN, L-1, E-3, F-1 (OPT/CPT), and O-1. Note the O-1 addition on this req specifically. That's an unusual and valuable option for exceptional international engineers.

Anti-patterns

• Solutions Engineers who demo and hand off. If they haven't shipped code to production for a customer, they fail the loop.
• Backend engineers with no customer surface. Half this job is in the customer's room.
• Consultants who produce architecture diagrams but don't build
• Anyone who needs a spec written for them
• Slow-cycle enterprise integration engineers from SI shops running 9–12 month deliveries
• Engineers who want pure IC depth work with no client contact

Who Will Thrive Here

Someone who's been dropped into a customer's messy environment, figured out what was actually needed, built it in Python against three APIs that barely document themselves, and presented it to a VP the following week. They're the most customer-fluent engineer on the team and the most technical person on the customer call. Ex-founders fit this shape naturally — the JD says so explicitly.