Founding AI Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

Remote (US) | 20–30% travel | Full-time Say hello to opportunities. It’s not every day that you consider starting a new career. We’re RingCentral, and we’re happy that someone as talented as you is considering this role. First, a little about us, we’re a $2.6 Billion annual revenue company with double digit Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and a $93 Billion market opportunity in UCaaS, Contact Center and AI-powered adjacencies. We invest more than $250 million annually to ensure our AI-enabled technology and platforms meet or exceed the needs of our customers. AIR Pro is RingCentral’s agentic AI platform for enterprise voice and digital customer interactions. The platform enables organizations to automate customer experience conversations with measurable business outcomes. We have thousands of customers already running RingCentral AI products today. That install base is your deployment surface: real production traffic, real contact centers, real revenue on the line from day one. This is where you and your skills come in. RingCentral is standing up a Forward-Deployed Engineering function. There is no playbook. You will help write it. This is a builder role. You will spend most of your time inside customer environments shipping production agentic AI systems: designing multi-turn voice and digital agents, building integrations to CRMs, EHRs, and ticketing systems, and instrumenting everything so outcomes are measurable. You carry direct accountability for containment rates, handle-time reduction, and expansion, and you get the authority that goes with it: a defined escalation path into Product and Engineering, a standing mechanism for roadmap input based on what you hit in the field, and committed engineering support for platform blockers. You will support pre-sales for your accounts (demos, POCs, technical scoping), and what you learn will shape how we hire, structure, and scale the FDE team. If you want a narrowly scoped lane, this isn't it. If you want to define a function inside a platform with a large enterprise base, it is. Job Duties: Own end to end strategic customer deployments. A focused portfolio, depth over breadth: discovery, workflow analysis (call routing, agent scripts, escalation paths, back-office handoffs), success criteria definition, production deployment, iteration, proven ROI, expansion. Build production systems. Multi-turn agent workflows: prompt design, retrieval pipelines, decision logic, fallback handling, live-agent handoff. Integrations to customer systems of record. Guardrails and compliance controls (PII, HIPAA, PCI) fit to each environment. Instrument everything. Deploy evaluation, monitoring, and testing frameworks so agent performance is continuously measured and improved. Success criteria are set before deployment, not reverse-engineered after. Shape the platform. Your field findings feed roadmap prioritization directly. Document integration patterns, platform gaps, and recurring requirements with enough technical depth that Engineering can act on them. Support the sale. Senior technical resource for your accounts pre-sales: live demonstrations, architectural conversations, proof-of-concept builds, deployment scoping alongside AEs and Sales Engineers. Turn pilot results into expansion cases. The stack You'll work directly with AIR Pro's agent orchestration layer, its APIs and integration framework, retrieval and knowledge tooling, and evaluation/observability infrastructure, plus whatever the customer runs (Salesforce, Epic, ServiceNow, custom APIs). You'll go deep on LLM behavior in production: prompt architecture, tool use, latency budgets for voice, failure modes, and evals. Desired Qualifications: Required A strong engineer first. You write and ship production code (Python and/or TypeScript), build and debug API integrations independently, and have owned systems running in production. This is a hands-on-keyboard role. 4+ years in customer-facing technical work where you personally built what was deployed: forward-deployed engineering, solutions architecture with real implementation ownership, or technical consulting. Working depth with LLMs in production: RAG, agent orchestration, evaluation. You've debugged why an agent fails, not just demoed one that works. Communicates across the range: design reviews with engineers, business cases with executives, and difficult conversations with customers when a deployment needs to change course. Thrives with incomplete information, competing priorities, and no one telling you what to do next. Bachelor's degree or equivalent military/work experience. Preferred Voice/telephony depth: SIP, WebRTC, SBCs, or CCaaS/UCaaS platform experience. Voice agents are harder than chat, and this is a voice-first platform. Enterprise-scale agentic AI deployments, voice or digital. Industry depth in healthcare, financial services, retail, or insurance. Familiarity with the competitive conversational AI landscape. Why this role Founding-hire leverage. Everything you build (deployment methodology, eval standards, integration patterns, hiring bar) becomes how the team works. That's rare inside a public company with an existing enterprise base to deploy into. No cold start. You are not hunting for design partners. Strategic customers are already under contract and waiting for exactly this function. Product influence with teeth. Structured, committed feedback loop into Product and Engineering, not a suggestion box. What we offer: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, disability, life insurance Health Savings Account (HSA), Flexible Spending Account (FSAs) and Commuter benefits Voluntary supplemental health coverage and life insurance 401K match and ESPP Paid time off and paid sick leave Paid parental and pregnancy leave Family-forming benefits (IVF, Preservation, Adoption etc.) Emergency backup care (Child/Adult/Pets) Employee Assistance Program (EAP) with counseling sessions available 24/7 Free legal services that provide legal advice, document creation and estate planning Employee bonus referral program Student loan refinancing assistance Employee 1:1 coaching, perks and discounts program RingCentral’s work culture is the backbone of our success. And don’t just take our word for it: we are recognized as a Best Place to Work by Glassdoor, the Top Work Culture by Comparably and hold local BPTW awards in every major location. Bottom line: We are committed to hiring and retaining great people because we know you power our success. About RingCentral RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of business cloud communications and contact center solutions based on its powerful Message Video Phone™ (MVP™) global platform. More flexible and cost effective than legacy on-premises PBX and video conferencing systems that it replaces, RingCentral® empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect via any mode, any device, and any location. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world. RingCentral is an equal opportunity employer that truly values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities during our application and interview process. If you require such accommodations, please click on the following link to learn more about how we can assist you. If you are hired in Colorado, California, Hawaii, Nevada, New York, Maryland, Washington, Connecticut, Rhode Island, the compensation range for this position is between $147,700 and $215,000 for full-time employees, in addition to eligibility for variable pay, equity, and benefits. Benefits may include, but are not limited to, health and wellness, 401k, ESPP, vacation, parental leave, and more! The salary may vary depending on your location, skills, and experience.