Sr. Director, Agentic Engineering

Responsibilities

• Own the agentic engineering strategy, roadmap, budget, and delivery of Dialpad's agentic platform, including orchestration layers, memory architectures, tool-use and API-execution frameworks, and evaluation, observability, and safety systems.
• Own the health, growth, and succession planning of the organization (~130 engineers), managing performance, headcount budgets, and career progression for managers and senior IC architects.
• Build scalable, multi-modal AI agents capable of autonomous reasoning, real-time conversational interaction, and secure tool execution across complex enterprise workflows.
• Establish clear multi-team goals, robust QA and regression processes, and operational metrics (KPIs) that hold the platform to enterprise standards.
• Create clear job descriptions, leveling guides, and onboarding plans to sustain a diverse, high-performing engineering organization.
• Partner with the executive team and division leaders to set long-term direction, communicate changes, and align with wider business strategy.
• Collaborate with peers in Product, Design, Applied Research, Support, and Finance to understand customer needs, maximize resource ROI, and eliminate cross-team friction.
• Work with Talent Acquisition and HR to calibrate hiring bars, recruit top-tier talent, and extend competitive offers.
• Stay ahead of emerging agent frameworks, LLM inference optimization, advanced retrieval systems, and evolving safety and policy guardrails.
• Monitor market and industry trends to influence department-wide goals and Dialpad's forward business strategy.

Requirements

• 12+ years of relevant engineering experience, including 5 to 8 years of leadership experience, with a proven track record of growing teams, developing managers, and steering an organization of 100+ engineers.
• Experience scaling distributed systems and production-grade infrastructure, then evolving into applied AI, LLM platforms, and agentic architectures.
• Shipped production systems where AI agents reason, act, coordinate, and safely execute workflows.
• Depth in several of: LLM platforms and inference optimization; retrieval systems and memory architectures; agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain/LangGraph, CrewAI, AWS/Google agent ecosystems); evaluation, observability, and safety frameworks for AI systems; real-time streaming infrastructure and conversational AI; tool use, API-execution frameworks, and human-in-the-loop systems.
• Operational excellence in setting multi-team goals, using KPIs, and identifying planning risks and tech-debt.
• People and career leadership: coaching managers, mentoring senior ICs, healthy OKRs, managing performance, championing diversity.
• Strategic planning: managing cross-division dependencies, optimizing multi-million-dollar budgets, representing the company externally.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with multi-agent orchestration platforms performing real-time conversational reasoning and tool execution over large-scale data.