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. Your Role As a Tech Lead Manager on our Agentic AI initiatives, you will play a hybrid leadership role across technical direction, execution, and people management. You will help shape and deliver Dialpad’s next-generation AI platform, building production-grade systems where AI agents reason, act, coordinate, and safely execute workflows. Working closely with Product, Applied Research, Design, and Engineering leadership, you will lead a small team of engineers while remaining deeply involved in architecture, technical decision-making, and delivery. This role is ideal for a leader who can alternate between hands-on technical leadership and engineering management, helping the team move from concept to reliable production systems. You will contribute to the development of multi-agent orchestration frameworks capable of real-time conversational reasoning and tool execution over large enterprise datasets, while fostering a strong AI-native engineering culture. This position reports directly to our Senior Director of Engineering and has the opportunity to be based in our San Francisco office. What You’ll Do 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. Skills You’ll Bring 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. Systems Background: Strong foundations in scaling distributed systems and production-grade infrastructure before evolving into applied AI, LLM platforms, and agentic architectures. Leadership: Ability to lead and grow a small group of engineers. 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. For exceptional talent based in California, the target base salary range for this position is posted below. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting 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. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. California Salary Range $249,500—$273,500 USD Why Join Dialpad Work at the center of the AI transformation in business communications Build and ship agentic AI products that are redefining how companies operate Join a team where AI amplifies every employee’s impact Competitive salary, comprehensive benefits, and real opportunities for growth We believe in investing in our people. Dialpad offers competitive benefits and perks, cutting-edge AI tools, and a robust training program that help you reach your full potential. We have designed our offices to be inclusive, offering a vibrant environment to cultivate collaboration and connection. Our exceptional culture, repeatedly recognized as a Great Place to Work, ensures that every employee feels valued and empowered to contribute to our collective success. Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role and possess the fundamental traits, drive, and strong ambition we seek, but your experience doesn’t meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply. Dialpad is an equal-opportunity employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment.