Engineering Manager (Agentic Systems)

About the role

Dialpad is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the technical direction and execution for a meaningful area of Dialpad's agentic AI platform. This role involves shaping and delivering the next-generation AI platform, building production-grade systems where AI agents reason, act, coordinate, and safely execute workflows. The role requires a blend of technical leadership and people management, working closely with Product, Applied Research, Design, and Engineering leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead Technical Direction: Own the technical direction and execution for a meaningful area of Dialpad’s agentic AI platform, including memory architectures, retrieval systems, and evaluation or observability capabilities.
• Build and Scale: Stay close to the code and design work, contributing hands-on where needed to unblock the team, accelerate critical efforts, and maintain a high technical bar.
• Manage and Grow a Team: Lead and grow a small team of engineers through coaching, feedback, career development, and performance management. Create clarity around priorities, ownership, and execution, and help the team operate effectively through ambiguity.
• Partner on hiring and onboarding to build a strong, high-performing team.
• Partner Cross-Functionally: Collaborate with leadership across Product, Engineering, and Applied Research to align technical execution with Dialpad’s long-term business strategy.
• Push the frontier pragmatically: Evaluate emerging agent frameworks, inference optimization techniques, retrieval approaches, and safety guardrails, and apply them where they create meaningful product or platform advantage.
• Raise the Engineering Bar: Establish strong engineering practices across design review, operational readiness, testing, quality, and AI safety. Mentor engineers and tech leads, reinforce sound technical judgment, and help define standards for an AI-native software development lifecycle.

Requirements

Experience: 10+ years of relevant software engineering experience, with a proven track record of technical and engineering leadership (as a Tech lead or a first line manager) shipping complex, large-scale systems. Experience in AI, ML platforms, LLM systems, or agentic architectures is strongly preferred.

Skills

• Systems Background: Strong foundations in scaling distributed systems and production-grade infrastructure before evolving into applied AI, LLM platforms, and agentic architectures.
• Core Technical Expertise: You have shipped production systems where AI agents reason, act, coordinate, and safely execute workflows. You bring deep expertise in:
• LLM Platforms: Inference optimization and fine-tuning strategies.
• Data & Retrieval: Advanced retrieval systems and memory architectures.
• Agent Frameworks: Hands-on experience with frameworks like LangChain/LangGraph, CrewAI, or AWS/Google Agent ecosystems.
• AI Ops: Evaluation, observability, and safety frameworks for production AI systems.
• Real-Time Infrastructure: Streaming infrastructure and voice/conversational AI.
• Tool Integration: Tool use, API execution frameworks, and human-in-the-loop validation systems.

Leadership & Mindset

• Technical leadership: You can set direction for a team, identify key architectural risks, and guide execution without losing sight of detail.
• People leadership: You can coach engineers effectively, give clear feedback, manage performance, and support career growth.
• Operational excellence: You know how to create clarity, define measurable goals, and systematically close quality, reliability, and technical debt gaps.
• The 0→1 Archetype: Ability to thrive in ambiguity, build cutting-edge AI products from the ground up, and scale them into robust, self-sustaining enterprise systems.

Pay

The target base salary range for this position is $249,500—$273,500 USD.