Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

Our customers are large service businesses with messy, real-world operations — and the difference between a demo and a deployment that handles thousands of live calls is enormous. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll close that gap. You'll embed with our most important customers, learn their operations inside-out, and design, build, and ship the Voice AI deployments that run their phones. You sit at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer — and you own the outcome, not a ticket.

What you'll do

• Embed with new and strategic customers to understand their call flows, systems, and edge cases — then turn that into a working deployment.
• Design, build, and tune Voice AI agents: prompts, integrations, call logic, and the glue code that connects Sono to a customer's stack.
• Own deployments end-to-end — from first scoping call to live in production and the iteration that follows.
• Be the technical voice in the room with customers, and the customer's voice back inside the product and engineering teams.
• Spot what's repeatable, and turn one-off field work into reusable product, tooling, and playbooks the whole company benefits from.
• Debug live, high-stakes issues fast — and ship fixes that hold.

What we're looking for

• 3+ years building and shipping software, with strong fundamentals and the ability to move fast across the stack.
• Comfortable in ambiguity: you take a vague customer problem and turn it into something that works in production.
• Genuinely customer-facing — you enjoy being in front of customers and can translate between business needs and technical reality.
• A bias for shipping. You'd rather get a real thing live and iterate than polish in a vacuum.
• Strong written and spoken English.
• Real excitement about AI, LLMs, and Voice — and the judgment to know where they work and where they don't.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, or building agentic / Voice AI systems.
• You've worked in a forward-deployed, solutions, or customer-facing engineering role before.
• You've been a startup entrepreneur — founded or co-founded your own company, or built something of your own from scratch.
• Familiarity with telephony, contact-center, or CRM integrations.

Why Sono

We're a VC-backed, founder-led team building the best Enterprise Voice AI for complex services. We've all been entrepreneurs before, we play to win, and we use the latest technology in everything we do. You'll get meaningful equity, vast ownership from day one, and work that reaches real businesses and real callers every single day.