NadaLab.Ai Hiring! Full Time Forward Deployment Engineer in - Ricebowl

Forward Deployment Engineer (FDE)

Turn a signed POC into a live deployment.

Summary:

The Forward Deployment Engineer (FDE) is the linchpin of NadaLab's POC-to-paid motion. You embed with clients and take their Voice AI from signed POC to live-in-production — bridging our platform with the messy reality of customer telephony, data, language and workflows. You sit inside a delivery pod and own the result.

About NadaLab:

NadaLab is a Southeast Asian Voice AI company transforming customer engagement across Collections, Customer Service and Telesales. Our platform supports 50+ languages and dynamic code-switching. We combine Voice AI technology with local language intelligence, deep business domain knowledge, implementation capability, operational excellence and continuous R&D.

The Role:

This is a hands-on, customer-facing engineering role for someone who can operate independently in ambiguity. You will configure, integrate, tune, test and deploy Voice AI solutions while working directly with client operations, CX and technical teams. You own the solution until it reaches its agreed success metric.

Key Responsibilities:

• End-to-end deployment ownership: Take signed POCs to live production largely independently — configuration, integration, tuning, UAT, go-live and early-life support.
• Real-time Voice AI tuning & diagnosis: Listen to live calls and transcripts and diagnose latency, false barge-in, interruption handling, containment failures, persona drift and other live-behaviour issues.
• Persona engineering & localisation: Engineer the agent's voice, register, tone, language and code-switching for the client's exact use case, including BM, Manglish, Singlish, Mandarin and Cantonese.
• Systems integration: Connect the agent to client telephony, CRM, data feeds and messaging channels. Read API documentation and make systems work together without waiting for a fully specified ticket.
• Customer-facing technical translation: Work with non-technical operations and CX teams to turn ambiguous needs into working configurations, manage expectations and build trust.
• AI-leveraged build speed: Use AI tooling and agents to configure, test and ship quickly — prioritising production outcomes and iterative improvement.
• Field-to-platform feedback loop: Identify gaps in the core platform and provide clear, prioritised feedback to product / CTO. Act as the eyes and ears of product at the customer coalface.

What We're Looking For

Must-Have Capabilities:

1. End-to-end deployment ownership: Comfortable being the primary technical person with a client and owning the result through to the success metric.

2. Real-time voice diagnosis: Able to hear what is wrong in a live interaction and fix the behaviour, not just the underlying code.

3. Persona engineering: Can tune voice, register, tone, language and code-switching for a specific customer and use case.

4. Systems integration: Strong API and integration instincts; able to connect telephony, CRM, data and messaging systems.

5. Customer-facing technical translation: Can work credibly with operations and CX teams and translate vague requirements into technical configuration.

6. AI-leveraged engineering: Uses AI tooling and agentic workflows to move rapidly from brief to working solution.

7. Product feedback mindset: Can identify recurring field problems and turn them into clear, prioritised product and platform requirements.

— Voice / conversational AI, telephony or contact-centre background.

— SIP / carrier telephony, WhatsApp Business API and webhooks.

— Multilingual: BM / Mandarin / regional dialects; can hear when a persona sounds off.

— Prior customer-embedded delivery: FDE, solutions or sales engineering.

— SEA market / regulatory familiarity, including collections compliance and PDPA.

Technical Environment:

The role sits at the intersection of Voice AI, LLMs, real-time communications and enterprise integration. Relevant experience includes Python or scripting, REST APIs, webhooks, JSON, telephony / SIP, STT / TTS, LLM APIs, AI agent frameworks, CRM integrations, WhatsApp Business API, cloud services, Git and production debugging. We value practical engineering ability over a particular technology stack.

How We Will Assess You:

• Voice diagnosis: Given a transcript of a call that went wrong, diagnose the issue end-to-end — including latency, interruption handling, containment and persona behaviour.
• Localisation: A client says the agent sounds too robotic in Manglish. Explain what you would change across persona, language, prompting, speech and conversation design.
• Live deployment exercise: Given a client brief and the NadaLab platform, scope the integration and first persona configuration. We will look for ownership, speed, technical judgement and customer translation.

What Success Looks Like:

You take ownership of a client deployment from POC to production, achieve the agreed business and conversation-quality metrics, build client confidence, and leave behind a stable operating solution. You also improve NadaLab by feeding high-quality field insight back into product and R&D.