Head of AI Agent Platform & Scale

Podium; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Podium is building the industry‑defining AI agent platform for local business. We seek a Senior Director of Engineering to own the AI Agents product, architect scalable systems, and lead a growing team delivering reliable workflows across thousands of conversations.

You will partner with Product and Infrastructure to define roadmaps, drive evaluation infrastructure, ensure observability, and mentor engineers.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software leadership experience (Director/Head of Engineering or equivalent).
• Direct experience building and operating production AI/agentic systems with real users at scale.
• Deep fluency in AI architecture: orchestration, tool-calling, RAG, context management.
• Experience building and scaling evaluation systems for non-deterministic software.
• Led both 0-to-1 builds and 1-to-scale hardening in high-growth SaaS.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with Product, Infrastructure, and customer-facing teams.
• Hands-on fluency with modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar).

Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture and roadmap for Podium’s AI agent platform across orchestration, tooling, memory, and reasoning.
• Lead and grow a team of engineers, staying hands-on in design, code, and incident response.
• Build and mature evaluation infrastructure, including offline/online eval harnesses and quality metrics.
• Drive 0-to-1 expansion and 1-to-scale reliability, latency, and cost as usage grows.
• Partner with Product to translate business outcomes into technical bets.
• Work with Infrastructure/Platform teams to ensure observability, cost-efficiency, and resiliency.
• Engage with customers and sales/support to feed field signals into the roadmap.
• Establish best practices for prompt/context engineering, safety, and deployment.
• Represent AI Agents engineering in leadership conversations and tradeoffs.

Skills

Leadership

LLM systems

AI architecture

Evaluation systems

0 to 1 builds

1 to scale

Cross-functional

AI tooling

Product alignment

Job description

Podium is building the industry‑defining AI agent platform for local business. We seek a Senior Director of Engineering to own the AI Agents product, architect scalable systems, and lead a growing team delivering reliable workflows across thousands of conversations.

You will partner with Product and Infrastructure to define roadmaps, drive evaluation infrastructure, ensure observability, and mentor engineers.