Sr. Director, Agentic Engineering

Your role
As the leader of Dialpad's Agentic Engineering organization, you will own the vision, architecture, and execution of our agentic AI platform: systems where AI agents reason, act, coordinate, and safely execute workflows in production. You will lead an established organization of approximately 130 engineers across 4 to 8 teams and sub-teams, working closely with Product, Applied Research, and Design leaders to advance a multi-agent orchestration platform that performs real-time conversational reasoning and tool execution over large-scale data.

This is a leadership role first. We are looking for someone who understands what the right agentic architecture looks like, holds a high bar for quality and reliability, and grows the managers and senior architects who carry the work. You will not be writing production features day-to-day, but we expect you to be technical enough to set architectural direction, evaluate hard trade-offs, and get into the code when it sharpens your judgment.

This is an onsite position based in our San Francisco office, reporting to the Chief Technology Officer.

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.