Engineering Manager (Agentic Systems)

About Dialpad

Dialpad is the AI platform for customer experience, built to resolve customer problems in real time across voice and digital. Our AI agents learn from your best human agents and improve with every interaction, helping organizations understand their customers, deliver better experiences, increase operational efficiencies, and build a lasting competitive advantage. Unlike legacy systems built to route and answer, or standalone agentic bot vendors built to deflect, Dialpad was built to resolve. Our AI agents and human agents operate on a single platform with shared context, allowing Agentic AI to resolve issues, advance deals, and eliminate busywork through automation while seamlessly handing conversations to humans when needed, with full context preserved.

Market-leading brands, including Randstad, Motorola Solutions, Netflix, the San Diego Padres, the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, and Cal Athletics, trust Dialpad. Dialpad is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, and T-Mobile.

Being a Dialer

At Dialpad, AI isn’t just a feature; it’s how our teams do their best work every day. We put powerful AI tools in every employee’s hands so they can move faster, think bigger, and achieve more. We believe every conversation matters. And we’ve built the platform that turns those conversations into insight and action, for our customers and ourselves. We look for people who are intensely curious and hold themselves to a high bar. Our ambition is significant, and achieving it requires a team that operates at the highest level. We seek individuals who embody our core traits: Scrappy, Curious, Optimistic, Persistent, and Empathetic.

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. Help design and deploy scalable AI systems that support autonomous assistance, real-time voice reasoning, and secure API or tool execution across enterprise workflows.
• 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

• 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.
• Strong foundations in scaling distributed systems and production-grade infrastructure before evolving into applied AI, LLM platforms, and agentic architectures.
• Ability to lead and grow a small group of engineers.

Skills

• Core Technical Expertise: You have shipped production systems where AI agents reason, act, coordinate, and safely execute workflows. 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.
• Technical leadership: Ability to set direction for a team, identify key architectural risks, and guide execution without losing sight of detail.
• People leadership: Ability to coach engineers effectively, give clear feedback, manage performance, and support career growth.
• Operational excellence: Ability 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

For exceptional talent based in California, the target base salary range for this position is $249,500—$273,500 USD. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed reflects the target range for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits.
• Cutting-edge AI tools for every employee.
• A robust training program to help you reach your full potential.
• Inclusive, vibrant office environments designed to cultivate collaboration and connection.
• A culture repeatedly recognized as a Great Place to Work, ensuring every employee feels valued and empowered.