Engineering Manager (Agentic Systems)

Dialpad; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Dialpad in San Francisco is seeking a Tech Lead Manager to drive our Agentic AI initiatives, blending technical leadership with people management to deliver production-grade AI platforms.

You will shape architecture, guide a small team, and partner with Product, Applied Research, and Design to realize scalable, safe, real-time systems that empower AI agents to reason and execute workflows at enterprise scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering with leadership experience.
• Experience in AI/ML platforms and agentic architectures is preferred.
• Strong background in scalable distributed systems.
• Ability to coach and grow engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical direction and execution for agentic AI platform area.
• Contribute hands-on when needed to unblock the team.
• Hire and onboard to build a high-performing team.
• Collaborate with Product and Research to align with strategy.
• Establish engineering practices for safety and reliability.
• Mentor engineers and tech leads.

Skills

Leadership

Distributed systems

AI/LLM platforms

Team development

Tools

LangChain/LangGraph

CrewAI

AWS/Google Agent ecosystems

Job description

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.

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