Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Summary Forward Deployed Engineers take a defined use case from nothing to a working, production-grade system inside the customer's environment. That starts with knowing our platform deeply enough to combine its capabilities into solutions more complex than any single feature was designed for - and where a customer's specific needs call for something beyond the standard functionality, building that missing piece themselves. This is the role that builds the use case: not a prototype handed to someone else to production, but the system that goes live. This is a customer-facing role. Understanding the customer's needs and the realistic possibilities of their technical environment - and working in close, daily collaboration with them - is what makes a deployment succeed. We're in daily working contact with the customer's engineers and executives, mostly online, with our team and theirs operating as one delivery unit with shared planning. Success is measured on the customer's numbers - resolution rate, containment, response latency, CSAT, cost per contact - and accountability continues past go-live. Forward Deployed Engineering brings together two disciplines that used to sit apart: conversation design and integration engineering. An engineer who can build the technical logic behind a scenario; a conversation designer who can design the flow of the conversation itself - that is what an FDE is. We hire people who are genuinely strong in one of the two and want to grow the other - expert in both is a direction of travel, not an entry bar. The role is based in Prague and is part of a global function with teams in EMEA and North America. Please note this is a hybrid role with significant customer on-site availability required. Responsibilities • Own the solution design: translate a stated business problem into a technical architecture that fits the customer’s actual processes, constraints and systems. • Build the agent 0→1: design, build and iterate the first working version end to end - the system that goes into production, not a hand-off. • Close product gaps: build the custom extensions, integrations, services and tooling the deployment requires, without waiting for core roadmap prioritization. • Own the integration surface: systems of record, contact channels and data flows - and, for voice deployments, the telephony path from carrier to agent. • Evaluate, iterate, improve: define the workflow-specific tests that determine whether this deployment actually works, and iterate against real traffic until the numbers move. • Work as the customer’s technical counterpart: deploy alongside their engineers, monitor against the agreed KPIs, tune, and stay accountable past go-live. • Feed the platform: capture what you built as a reusable pattern and push recurring patterns toward the core product - the field is our sensing arm. • 2+ years building and shipping software in a customer-facing role - solutions or forward-deployed engineering, professional services delivery, integration engineering, or product engineering with direct customer exposure. • Genuine depth in at least one of our two disciplines, and the appetite to grow the other: conversation and agent design (dialogue logic, prompting, flows, evaluation) or integration engineering (APIs, services, systems of record, data flows). • Strong hands-on coding in JavaScript/TypeScript, Python and/or C#/.NET - comfortable writing and maintaining production services, not only scripts. • Solid working experience of SQL, Linux and Docker - just as important as the languages above. • Solid grasp of software architecture and API integration: authentication, webhooks, queues, error handling and failure modes. • Experience distributing data across critically loaded infrastructure, and the ability to account for race conditions, deadlocks and thread safety when designing systems. • Ability to work directly with customer engineers and executives - distil a complex system into a clear explanation, present a design, and defend a trade-off. • A track record of owning a complex project end to end, against real deliverables and real dates. • Comfort with ambiguity and with non-deterministic systems: forming a hypothesis, building the evaluation that tests it, and iterating to a number. • Willingness to travel. • Professional English, used daily with colleagues in EMEA and North America; Czech strongly preferred for work with regional customers. Preferred Experience • Conversational AI or voice agents in production - flow and prompt design, retrieval, tool calling, and evaluation harnesses against real traffic. • Contact centre and CCaaS platforms (Genesys, Avaya, NICE, Five9, Amazon Connect) plus telephony fundamentals - SIP, DTMF, transfer, failover. • Integration with enterprise systems of record: CRM, ERP, data warehouses, custom internal APIs. • Cloud and container deployment (Azure, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes). • GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and data residency handled as architectural constraints, not paperwork. • Using AI tooling as a core part of how you build, not a side tab you open occasionally. • Additional Central European languages, particularly Slovak, Polish or German.