Sr. Director, Agentic Engineering

What you'll do

Own

• The agentic engineering strategy, roadmap, budget, and delivery of Dialpad's agentic platform, including its orchestration layers, memory architectures, tool-use and API-execution frameworks, and evaluation, observability, and safety systems.
• The health, growth, and succession planning of your organization, managing performance, headcount budgets, and career progression for both 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.
• Clear multi-team goals, robust QA and regression processes, and operational metrics (KPIs) that hold the platform to enterprise standards of quality and reliability.
• 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 the organization with Dialpad's wider business strategy.
• Peers in Product, Design, Applied Research, Support, and Finance to understand customer needs, maximize resource ROI, and eliminate cross-team friction and duplication.
• Talent Acquisition and HR to calibrate hiring bars, recruit top-tier talent, and extend competitive, equitable offers.

Stay ahead of

• Emerging agent frameworks, LLM inference optimization, advanced retrieval systems, and evolving safety and policy guardrails, keeping Dialpad's platform at the frontier.
• Market and industry trends, using deep domain awareness to influence department-wide goals, milestones, and Dialpad's forward business strategy.

Skills you'll bring

• 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.
• A core technical signal: you have shipped production systems where AI agents reason, act, coordinate, and safely execute workflows. You bring depth in several of the following:
  • 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: setting clear multi-team goals, using KPIs to drive decisions, and systematically identifying planning risks and tech-debt gaps.
• People and career leadership: coaching managers, mentoring senior ICs, holding teams accountable through healthy OKRs, managing performance issues promptly, and championing diversity and inclusion.
• Strategic planning: managing cross-division dependencies, optimizing multi-million-dollar infrastructure and headcount budgets, and confidently representing the company externally to partners, vendors, and the broader community.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.