Forward Deployed Engineer, Agentic AI

PolyAI; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private healthcare and dental cover

WFH allowance

Sabbatical program

Annual learning and development budget

Job summary

PolyAI is seeking a Forward Deployment Engineer to own client agents from scoping through production and beyond. You will design agent behavior, code integrations to customer systems, connect to phone lines, and continuously improve performance in real-time conversations.

You should have shipped LLM-powered agents, strong Python production skills, and experience with enterprise integrations and telephony platforms.

Qualifications

• Shipped LLM-powered agents or conversational systems to real users.
• Strong Python and production code skills; experience with APIs and integrations.
• Experience with forward deployed/solutions engineering that ships real code.
• Familiarity with real-time voice/telephony systems (SIP, CCaaS).

Responsibilities

• Own agents in production end-to-end; scope with customer and design conversation and tools.
• Connect agents to real-world systems via APIs and integrations; work across telephony platforms.
• Debug live calls and diagnose issues across speech, model, or integration components.
• Run evaluations, A/B tests, and use data to guide what ships.
• Lead customer sessions and explain trade-offs; build reusable tools and templates.

Skills

Python production code

APIs

Integrations

Go

C++

LLM deployment

Real-time voice systems

Tools

SIP

Job description

PolyAI is the Agentic Dialog Platform for building the conversational enterprise, used to build, run, govern, and improve dialog agents at scale. Powered by Raven, a proprietary dialog model trained on more than a billion enterprise conversations, PolyAI agents are built for complexity, open at every layer, and sovereign by design. PolyAI serves hundreds of enterprises across 75 languages and 25 countries, including Metro Bank, Marriott, PG&E, and UniCredit.

The role

Most AI agents are demos. Ours answer the phone for some of the biggest brands in the world: more than 100 million calls a year, across 2,000+ live deployments. Someone is on the line trying to move a booking, report a fault or pay a bill, and the agent either works or it doesn't.

We looking for a Forward Deployment Engineer who has built and shipped LLM agents in production, including tool use and evals. Forward Deployed Engineers are the people who make it work. You own a customer's agents from the first scoping call through to production and beyond. You design how the agent behaves, write the code that connects it to the customer's systems, put it on their phone lines, measure it and keep making it better.

This is not sales engineering and it is not support. You ship code that runs in production, and you own what happens after it ships.

We want someone who already builds agents because they can't help it, and who wants to do it at the hard end: real-time voice, messy enterprise systems, and callers who notice every mistake.

What you'll do

• Own agents in production, end to end. Scope with the customer; design the conversation, the tools and the guardrails; build in Agent Studio and our ADK; launch; and stay accountable for how it performs.
• You have built and shipped LLM agents in production, including tool use and evals
• Connect agents to the real world. Integrate CRMs, booking engines, payment flows and twenty-year-old APIs in Python. Work across SIP, telephony and contact-centre platforms. Make tool calls fast and reliable in the middle of a live conversation.
• Debug live calls. When a call goes wrong, work out whether it was the speech recognition, the model, the prompt, an integration or the phone line, and fix the right thing.
• Run agents like a scientist. Build eval sets from real calls, run A/B tests and let data decide what ships. Containment, resolution and caller experience are your numbers.
• Close the gap to the platform. When you solve something for one customer, turn it into a reusable tool, template or product change so the next deployment is faster. Work directly with product, research and platform engineering, including the team training Raven, our own LLM built for customer service.
• Be the technical lead the customer trusts. Run sessions with their engineering, operations and executive teams. Explain trade-offs plainly. Say no when no is the right answer.
• Work AI-native. You use coding agents and LLM tooling every day, and you help the people around you do the same.

You'll fit if

• You have shipped LLM-powered agents or conversational systems to real users, and you can show us one.
• You write strong Python and are at home in production code, APIs and integrations, including codebases you didn't write.
• You have several years in a technical, customer-facing engineering role: forward deployed, solutions engineering that ships real code, consulting engineering, or a startup where you were the engineer customers called.
• You own outcomes, not tickets. You have been the person on call when it broke, and you liked it.
• You can explain a latency budget to an engineer and a containment trade-off to a COO in the same afternoon.
• Voice and telephony: SIP, IVR, CCaaS platforms, real-time audio.
• Evals and experimentation, or an ML background: you have built a test set or run an online experiment.
• Regulated industries such as healthcare, utilities or financial services.
• Go or C++, or high-throughput real-time systems.

Why PolyAI

• Voice is the hard channel, and it's all we do. Real-time, interruptible, noisy, on phone lines built decades ago. Doing it well at enterprise scale is a moat, and you will learn things here you can't learn anywhere else.
• We own the stack that matters. Raven is our own LLM, trained for customer service inside the agent harness. When the model is the problem, the people who can fix it sit down the corridor.
• Real production, real stakes. Your agents go live for brands people have heard of, and you will see the impact in their numbers within weeks.
• Ownership early. Small teams, each engineer owning accounts. The best ideas from the field become the product.
• London HQ. Founded by conversational-AI researchers from Cambridge, with teams in London and North America.

We offer competitive compensation based on experience, expertise, and the level of responsibility. This role also includes equity, giving you the opportunity to share in the long-term success of the business. The listed expectations reflect what we're hiring for, so we encourage you to review the job description carefully.

Participation in the company’s employee share options plan

Tenure-Based PTO: You will receive 25 holidays when you join and will gain an additional 1 day after 2 years of service, then 1 day each year until capped at 32 holidays

Flexible working from home policy

Work from outside of the UK for up to 6 months each year

TELUS Health EAP 24/7 - offers you and your chosen family confidential, judgment-free support for any work, health, or life challenge

Annual learning and development allowance

We’re all about making WFH work for you - that’s why we offer a one-off WFH allowance when you join. Offering perks like noise-cancelling headphones or a comfortable desk chair to boost your comfort and focus!

Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes

Private healthcare and dental cover, discounts on gym members and relaxation apps, and access to a range of mental health programs

Sabbatical Program: 5-week paid sabbatical available after 5 years of employment

At PolyAI, we take great pride in our values - they guide everything we do. We believe that a strong culture leads to meaningful work and lasting impact.

Our core values are:

Only the best
We expect the best from our people, we hire people that expect the best from themselves, and we nurture this drive for excellence.

Ownership
We care deeply about what we do. We take ownership of our initiatives, decisions and outcomes.

Relentlessly improve
We demand more from ourselves and are always evolving. Continuous, obsessive improvement is the only way we will transform the world of conversational AI.

Bias for action
Our world moves quickly and so do we. We take calculated risks and we deliver impact fast.

Disagree and commit
We are all working toward the same goal. If we donʼt agree with something, we work hard to understand it and when a decision is made, we accept it and give it our all.

Build for people
We want the world to enjoy the experiences they have with us. We are building for a future that prefers automation.

PolyAI is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment decisions at PolyAI will be based on the business needs without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, neurodiversity status or disability status.

Kindly find the Privacy Notice for our recruitment process by following the link here . This document provides important information regarding how we handle your personal data throughout the recruitment journey.