Forward Deployed Engineer - San Francisco Bay Area

Xcede; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Xcede is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to sit at the intersection of engineering and customer delivery, working directly with the engineering teams of some of the world's most ambitious companies as they build on top of the platform.

This role embeds with customer teams to solve production problems, own end-to-end delivery, and communicate effectively with both customers and product teams. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the role offers high ownership in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional backend/infrastructure engineering experience.
• Strong backend/infrastructure engineer with hands-on experience in Python, comfortable picking up new languages and stacks as needed.
• Experienced building and operating APIs, SDKs, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Able to quickly understand complex, unfamiliar systems and debug issues under pressure.
• A strong communicator who can move fluidly between deep technical debugging and explaining a solution clearly to a customer.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, low-process, high-ownership environment.
• Based in, or willing to work from, the San Francisco Bay Area.

Responsibilities

• Embed directly with customer engineering teams to solve real production problems, not sit behind a ticket queue
• Own technical delivery end-to-end, from scoping an ambiguous problem through to shipping a working solution in a live environment
• Debug and resolve complex, real-world issues across distributed, high-scale systems under real production pressure
• Act as the technical bridge between customer engineering teams and internal product and engineering, feeding real usage back into the roadmap
• Move fast in a low-process, high-ownership environment where you're trusted to make the right call

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

APIs

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Communication

SF Bay Area

WebRTC

Voice AI

Job description

Xcede has partnered exclusively with a company that just closed a $100M Series funding round at a $1B+ valuation, building the real-time voice and video infrastructure behind the next generation of AI applications. The platform already powers the voice and agentic AI experiences of some of the most recognisable consumer and AI brands in the world, handling billions of real-time interactions every year across tens of thousands of developers, and the Forward Deployed Engineering function is scaling fast to keep pace.

We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to sit at the intersection of engineering and customer delivery, working directly with the engineering teams of some of the world's most ambitious companies as they build on top of the platform.

In this role you will:

• Embed directly with customer engineering teams to solve real production problems, not sit behind a ticket queue
• Own technical delivery end-to-end, from scoping an ambiguous problem through to shipping a working solution in a live environment
• Debug and resolve complex, real-world issues across distributed, high-scale systems under real production pressure
• Act as the technical bridge between customer engineering teams and internal product and engineering, feeding real usage back into the roadmap
• Move fast in a low-process, high-ownership environment where you're trusted to make the right call

Who you are:

• 4+ years of professional backend/infrastructure engineering experience
• A strong backend/infrastructure engineer with hands-on experience in Python, comfortable picking up new languages and stacks as needed
• Experienced building and operating APIs, SDKs, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Able to quickly understand complex, unfamiliar systems and debug issues under pressure
• A strong communicator who can move fluidly between deep technical debugging and explaining a solution clearly to a customer
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, low-process, high-ownership environment
• Based in, or willing to work from, the San Francisco Bay Area

Nice to have:

• Experience with WebRTC, real-time media systems, or telephony/SIP infrastructure
• Background in voice AI or conversational agents
• Prior experience in a customer-facing engineering role (Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, or similar)