Forward Deployed Engineer

About DialpadDialpad is the AI platform for customer experience, built to resolve customer problems in real time across voice and digital. Our AI agents learn from your best human agents and improve with every interaction, helping organizations understand their customers, deliver better experiences, increase operational efficiencies, and build a lasting competitive advantage.

Unlike legacy systems built to route and answer, or standalone agentic bot vendors built to deflect, Dialpad was built to resolve. Our AI agents and human agents operate on a single platform with shared context, allowing Agentic AI to resolve issues, advance deals, and eliminate busywork through automation while seamlessly handing conversations to humans when needed, with full context preserved.

Market-leading brands, including Randstad, Motorola Solutions, Netflix, the San Diego Padres, the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, and Cal Athletics, trust Dialpad. Dialpad is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, and T-Mobile.

Being a Dialer At Dialpad, AI isn’t just a feature; it’s how our teams do their best work every day. We put powerful AI tools in every employee’s hands so they can move faster, think bigger, and achieve more.

We believe every conversation matters. And we’ve built the platform that turns those conversations into insight and action, for our customers and ourselves.

We look for people who are intensely curious and hold themselves to a high bar. Our ambition is significant, and achieving it requires a team that operates at the highest level. We seek individuals who embody our core traits: Scrappy, Curious, Optimistic, Persistent, and Empathetic.

Your role The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a customer-embedded delivery engineer responsible for turning qualified AI opportunities into live, production-ready agent deployments. This role sits at the intersection of customer workflow design, applied AI engineering, enterprise integration, and production rollout. The core mission is to close the last-mile gap between platform capability and measurable customer outcomes by taking shaped opportunities from scoping through implementation and into the first production shift.

You will work directly with customer stakeholders, internal delivery teams, and product partners to design, build, evaluate, deploy, and stabilize AI agents in real operating environments. This is a highly customer-facing, hands-on role for someone who can translate ambiguity into working systems and can move fluidly between technical depth and business impact.

What you’ll do

• Convert prioritized use cases and pre-sales assumptions into a clear delivery scope, technical plan, and phased implementation approach.
• Work directly with customer technical and operational teams to map real workflows, exception paths, approvals, escalation rules, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Design and build customer-specific AI agent solutions, including orchestration logic, prompt architecture, retrieval flows, workflow rules, and decision logic.
• Implement integrations with customer data sources, APIs, SaaS platforms, CRMs, ERPs, and enterprise knowledge systems so agents can perform real work end to end.
• Develop evaluation methods, guardrails, and acceptance criteria that measure agent usefulness, reliability, safety, task success, and production readiness.
• Run iterative testing, failure analysis, and performance tuning to improve quality, groundedness, latency, cost, and operational effectiveness.
• Prepare solutions for production by addressing access controls, observability, rollout sequencing, exception handling, fallback behavior, and support readiness.
• Lead deployment activities through initial go-live and first-shift stabilization, including rapid issue resolution, workflow adjustments, and customer-facing hypercare.
• Document reusable implementation patterns, operational runbooks, known failure modes, and recommended next improvements to support scale and repeatability.
• Feed field learnings back into Product, Engineering, and transformation teams so future deployments become faster, safer, and more repeatable.
• Detailed solution scoping after deal alignment.
• Customer-specific implementation and agent behavior design.
• Technical integration across enterprise systems and data sources.
• Evaluation, iterative quality improvement, and production hardening.
• Go-live readiness and first-shift production stabilization.
• Executive value framing before opportunity qualification.
• Broad transformation-roadmap design across multiple business units.
• Portfolio-level governance program management.
• Long-term managed-service ownership after the initial deployment phase, unless the service model explicitly extends the role.

Skills you'll bring

• Experience in a high-impact, customer-facing technical role such as Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Technical Consulting, Deployment Engineering, or AI-focused SaaS implementation.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying AI, LLM, or agentic systems in production environments.
• Strong working knowledge of modern AI and application patterns, including LLMs, prompt engineering, retrieval systems, vector databases, evaluation methods, and agent orchestration frameworks.
• Proficiency in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, or similar languages used for integrations, middleware, and production deployment work.
• Experience working with APIs, enterprise integrations, and workflow automation across customer environments.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business objectives and SOPs into clear, shippable technical solutions.
• Keen attention to detail allowing you to quickly analyze results, showcase value-add to a customer, and iterate quickly.
• Strong customer communication skills, including the ability to explain trade-offs, risks, timelines, and technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• High ownership, strong judgment under ambiguity, and a bias toward action and measurable outcomes.

For exceptional talent based in California, the target base salary range for this position is posted below. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the target range for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.

California Salary Range

$124,800 - $171,600 USD

For exceptional talent based in Colorado the target base salary range for this position is posted below. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the target range for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.

Colorado Salary Range

$112,400 - $154,400 USD

Why Join Dialpad

• Work at the center of the AI transformation in business communications
• Build and ship agentic AI products that are redefining how companies operate
• Join a team where AI amplifies every employee’s impact
• Competitive salary, comprehensive benefits, and real opportunities for growth

We believe in investing in our people. Dialpad offers competitive benefits and perks, cutting-edge AI tools, and a robust training program that help you reach your full potential. We have designed our offices to be inclusive, offering a vibrant environment to cultivate collaboration and connection. Our exceptional culture, repeatedly recognized as a Great Place to Work, ensures that every employee feels valued and empowered to contribute to our collective success.

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role and possess the fundamental traits, drive, and strong ambition we seek, but your experience doesn’t meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply.

Dialpad is an equal-opportunity employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment.