Retell is building the new standard for automating call center communications, including sales, support, customer engagement, and retention calls.

Backed by Altman Capital, Y Combinator, and top investors, we've raised a $4.7M seed round and hit $7M ARR in 12 months.

Check us out on the Top Lean AI Native Companies Leaderboard at leanaileaderboard.com.

Retell AI - API That Turns Your LLM Into A Human-Like Voice Agent

Retell AI Basics: Everything You Need to Start Building Voice Agents

Vision

Twenty years ago, every business found itself needing a website, the new gateway to the world. Platforms like WordPress and Squarespace rose to become the standard for getting businesses online.

Today, a new revolution is here. Every business that relies on phone interactions can now have an AI voice agent of their dreams. A tireless and empathetic receptionist, salesperson, debt collector, or appointment reminder that works 24/7. Operational bottlenecks vanish overnight. Doubling your business no longer means doubling your team. Customer experience no longer suffers. (Ever tried calling an East Coast bank after 3 p.m. PT?) But companies aren't ready. Platforms don't exist.

At Retell, we're pioneering the new standard for building AI voice agents. With seamless UI, comprehensive toolkit, effortless integrations, thriving builder community, we're creating everything businesses need to deliver exceptional phone interactions on every single call.

Join us—because the future of AI voice agents is coming anyway, so why not be the one who defines it?

Role Overview

The Forward Deployed AI Engineer is a hybrid role between engineering and sales, focused on getting our largest enterprise customers to production—working closely with their teams to implement AI in complex business workflows, build key integrations, and bridge our platform with their tech stack. Beyond that, they might fly onsite to work directly with customers, host webinars, run office hours, support the developer community, and more. This role is ideal for entrepreneurial, generalist engineers who want broad exposure and thrive wearing many hats.

Position: Founding Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Job type: Full-time 70hr/week (50 hr/week onsite with flexible hours + 20 hr/week work from home)

Salary: $200K - $310K

Equity: 0.2% - 0.7%

Bonus: $20k - $100K

Location: San Carlos, CA, US

US visas: Sponsors Visa & Greencard

Benefits: 100% medical, dental, vision insurance covereage. Unlimited breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Gym, daily communte fee reimbursed. Internet, phone bill covered.

Job Description

Roles and responsibilities

• Partner with sales to drive successful deals and customer outcomes, ultimately increasing our number of enterprise customers.
• Work closely with our largest enterprise customers to get them to production—embedding with their teams to implement AI into complex business workflows and build key integrations between our platform and their tech stack.
• Execute enterprise customer requests to tailor the product for their specific domain needs, earning trust and alignment with key technical stakeholders.
• Identify, build, and ship product features and improvements driven by enterprise customer needs, collaborating closely with the core product and engineering teams.
• Act as a technical owner and advisor—whether that means flying onsite to co-build with customers, resolving support issues, unblocking adoption, or ensuring a smooth rollout.
• Contribute beyond engineering: host developer office hours, run webinars, support community forums, improve documentation, create internal tools, or even build sales enablement assets like pitch decks or demos.
• Serve as the connective tissue between our product, sales, engineering, and customer success teams—doing whatever it takes to help customers succeed and drive product adoption.

Qualifications

• Undergraduate degree in CS/CE/EE; 1+ years of working experience
• Friendliness & Empathy — Strong communication and presentation skills
• Accountability & Collaboration — Comfortable working with both sales and engineers; will do whatever it takes to deliver projects on time
• Proactiveness & Urgency — Willing to work long hours; can juggle multiple projects and deadlines
• Growth Mindset & Love of Learning — Strong adaptability in any setting; has exposure to the latest tech trends; knows how to use a wide range of technical and non-technical tools

Benefits

• Competitive salary with an equity package and year-end bonus
• Best health, dental, and vision insurance available, 100% covered by Retell for you
• Catered breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day
• Monthly commute expenses fully covered
• Unlimited snacks and drinks
• Monthly wellness reimbursement that you can spend on anything health-related
• H1B and Green Card sponsorship available
• The chance to innovate and push the boundaries of voice AI in a dynamic, venture-backed startup

Interview Process

Online Assessment

The online assessment will be sent via HackerRank. It consists of two coding questions and takes approximately 25–30 minutes to complete. Candidates have 7 days to submit their responses.

Phone Interview 1

A 30-minute interview focused on data structures and algorithms.

We will share a pair programming IDE link (CoderPad), and you may use your preferred programming language.

Phone Interview 2

A second 30–45 minute interview focused on data structures and algorithms.

We will again share a pair programming IDE link (CoderPad), and you may use your preferred programming language.

Onsite

This step involves 1–4 hours of interviews, conducted onsite in the San Francisco Bay Area. If the candidate lives outside of the Bay Area, the interviews may be conducted virtually.

Please bring a computer for writing code during the interviews.

There are up to four interview rounds:

• A practical coding session involving day-to-day coding tasks, documentation lookups, and debugging.
• A system design interview covering a high-level overview of the production system components. This provides candidates with a comprehensive view of our technical requirements and work environment.
• A practical tools session focused on building automations or using tools commonly used by software engineers.
• A behavioral interview covering past work experience and work style.