Forward Deployed Engineer- Voice Agents

RiyaLabs is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to build, integrate, and deploy AI voice agents for real-world customer workflows.
This is a hands-on engineering role with direct customer interaction. You will work across conversational AI, telephony, backend systems, and business integrations—taking solutions from discovery and prototype through production deployment.
We’re looking for someone who enjoys solving practical problems, working with customers, and building voice experiences that remain reliable beyond a demo.
What you’ll do:
- Work with customers to understand their workflows, identify automation opportunities, and define deployment requirements and success metrics.
- Build inbound and outbound AI voice agents for use cases such as customer support, appointment scheduling, lead qualification, and follow-up.
- Design conversational flows, prompts, tool calls, human handoffs, and fallback behavior.
- Connect voice agents to CRMs, calendars, ticketing systems, databases, and customer APIs.
- Integrate speech-to-text, language models, and text-to-speech into responsive conversational experiences.
- Handle interruptions, turn-taking, silence, transcription errors, and failed integrations.
- Own deployment, testing, monitoring, troubleshooting, and ongoing improvements.
- Evaluate call quality, task completion, latency, reliability, and cost per call.
- Translate customer feedback into reusable components, deployment playbooks, and product improvements.
- Implement customer-specific requirements for privacy, consent, call recording, and secure data handling.
What we’re looking for:
- Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript/Node.js.
- Experience building production applications with APIs, webhooks, authentication, and external integrations.
- Hands-on experience with LLM applications, including prompting, structured outputs, tool calling, and evaluation.
- Experience building AI voice agents or real-time conversational applications.
- Familiarity with telephony concepts, streaming audio, WebSockets, and SIP/WebRTC.
- Ability to debug issues across application code, infrastructure, model behavior, and third-party services.
- Clear communication skills and confidence working directly with technical and nontechnical customers.
- Strong ownership: you can take an ambiguous requirement, propose an approach, and deliver a working solution.
Nice to have:
- Experience with platforms or frameworks such as LiveKit, Pipecat, Vapi, Retell AI, or Twilio.
- Experience with speech services such as Deepgram, ElevenLabs, or comparable providers.
- Experience integrating with Salesforce, HubSpot, scheduling platforms, or contact-center systems.
- Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge bases, and conversational memory.
- Experience with Docker, cloud deployment, observability, and automated testing.
- Experience designing multilingual voice experiences.
- Previous work in customer-facing engineering, solutions engineering, implementation, or an early-stage startup.
What success looks like:
- Customers can use deployed agents reliably in their actual workflows.
- Agents complete defined tasks and escalate appropriately when they cannot.
- Integrations behave predictably, with clear monitoring and recovery paths.
- Deployments produce measurable results against agreed customer goals.
- Lessons from each deployment make the next one faster and more reliable.

Work arrangement
Hybrid