Forward Deployed Software Engineer - 2

Job description

About Exotel Exotel is India's leading AI-first cloud communications platform, powering over 25 billion customer conversations annually for 6,000+ enterprises across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. From voice and contact centres to AI-powered customer engagement, Exotel enables businesses to build reliable, scalable, and intelligent customer experiences. About the Role You will own a voicebot end to end from scope handover to go-live including its estimate, its schedule and the customer conversation that goes with it. This is a hands-on engineering role embedded in customer delivery, not a coordination role. What You'll Do Customer Engagement and Solution Delivery • Own the build of a complete voicebot, including the estimate and the delivery schedule. • Run requirement and design sessions with customers and translate what you hear into a workable solution. • Present pilot results, handle technical objections and drive user acceptance testing through to go-live. Conversation and LLM Engineering • Design the prompt architecture for a bot: persona, guardrails, escalation paths, language switching and failure behaviour. • Work with retrieval over customer knowledge bases and tune for accuracy and latency. • Improve bot quality through prompt optimisation and evaluation against defined test sets. Integrations and Engineering • Build non-standard integrations independently across whatever the customer runs — ticketing, CRM, marketing automation, deflection and contact centre systems — using REST APIs, webhooks and token-based authentication. • Debug across telephony, speech recognition and synthesis, and the customer's own stack. • Build reusable components rather than repeating the same work across customers. Product Input • Propose product improvements with a case attached — how many customers are affected and what it unblocks. What We're Looking For Experience • 2.5 to 5 years in a delivery, solutions or forward-deployed engineering role. • Demonstrated ownership of a customer-facing technical project from start to finish. Technical Expertise • Hands-on coding in Python and/or JavaScript or TypeScript. • Practical experience building on LLMs: prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation or guardrails. • Hands-on with REST APIs, webhooks and API authentication, and comfortable integrating with any customer communication stack — ticketing, CRM, marketing automation, deflection and similar systems. • Working understanding of voice technologies — IVR, SIP or VoIP, speech recognition and speech synthesis. Customer and Communication Skills • Confident presenting to customers and defending a technical design. • Able to hold scope in a customer conversation and escalate commercial questions rather than absorb them. • Clear written communication and disciplined follow-through. Education • Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or an equivalent computer-related degree. Good to Have • Experience with LLM application or agent frameworks. • Contact centre or customer engagement platforms. • Cloud platform experience across AWS, GCP or Azure. • Speech recognition or synthesis tuning.