Forward Deployed Software Engineer - 2

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.