The Senior Manager, Engineering - AI Agents will lead the development and delivery of Five9’s AI Agent software platform, which provides customers with fully autonomous self-service agents for customer support, sales, and services use cases in the contact center. This is one of the hottest areas of application for AI Agent technology! 

This role is responsible for building and managing a high-performing engineering team that develops scalable, reliable, and production-grade AI-powered systems used in real-time customer conversations. 

You will be responsible for hiring and developing engineers, improving engineering processes, and enabling strong execution across the software development lifecycle. While this is a management role rather than an individual contributor position, the ideal candidate will bring strong technical credibility with engineers and guide architecture discussions, technical decisions, and engineering best practices. 

You will collaborate closely with Product, SRE, Support, and other engineering teams to deliver an enterprise-grade platform while fostering a culture of operational excellence, ownership, and customer empathy. 

This role is hybrid. 3 days a week (M, W, TH) in our San Francisco office is required.

Key Responsibilities 

Team Leadership & Development 

• Hire, onboard, and grow a high-performing engineering teamof 4-8 engineers in the United States 
• Provide coaching, mentorship, and career development for engineers
• Establish clear ownership, accountability, and engineering rigor
• Conduct performance management, feedback, and growth planning
• Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and operational excellence
• Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders

Delivery & Execution 

• Lead planning and enable strong execution of engineering initiatives and product roadmap
• Ensure projects are delivered predictably and with high quality
• Focus on customer success, ensuring quality AI agent experiences with low latency and high accuracy
• Break down large initiatives into achievable milestones
• Partner with Product Management to prioritize work and manage trade-offs
• Collaborate with Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) teams on AI agent implementations
• Drive continuous improvement in development processes and team productivity

Technical Leadership 

• Perform code reviews, guide software architecture  andtechnical decisions  
• Review technical designs and ensure sound engineering practices
• Help teams make pragmatic technology decisions balancing innovation and reliability
• Drive the team to manage customer expectations of uptime and performance by defining and reviewing SLO/SLI's, developing metrics to measuring as such and maintainingfor all the services 
• Ensure systems are scalable, maintainable, and production-ready

Operational Excellence 

• Promote strong service ownership and reliability culture
• Ensure effective on-call practices and incident response processes
• Drive root cause analysis and continuous reliability improvements
• Partner with SRE teams to define SLIs, SLOs, and operational metrics
• Handle customer escalations and issues related to AI Agent quality
• Participate in on-call escalation rotations for provided services

Cross-Functional Collaboration 

• Work closely with Product, UX, SRE, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) and Support teams
• Align engineering execution with product strategy and customer needs
• Communicate engineering progress, risks, and technical decisions clearly to stakeholders

AI-Augmented Engineering Practices 

• Use of modern AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity, and represent “best in class” examples of how to effectively use it
• Help the team adopt responsible and effective use of AI in software development workflows
• Evaluate emerging developer AI tools and incorporate them wherebeneficial 
• Promote experimentation and learning around AI-enabled engineering practices

Required Experience 

• 3+ years experience leading or managing software engineering teams 
• 8+ years professional software development experience
• Experience participatingin hiring and helping grow engineering teams 
• 5+ years experience developing enterprise SaaS software 
• Strong background in distributed systems and modern software architectures
• Experience or exposure to GenAI / LLM-based systems
• Experience using or adopting AI-assisted software development tools
• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or similar
• Strong track recordin hiring outstanding software development teams, through rigorous interviewing and vetting processes – either as the hiring manager or as part of interview panels  

Desired Experience 

• 1-2 years experience building AI Agent platforms for CX, including voicebots, chatbots and AI assistants 

Technical Background 

While this role is primarily management-focused, candidates must have sufficient technical depth to guide architecture and mentor engineers. 

Software Engineering 

• Strong background in Java or JVM-based backend systems 
• Experience designing distributed systems or microservices architectures 
• Familiarity with API design (REST/gRPC) and scalable service architectures 

AI / GenAI Platforms 

• Familiarity with LLM-based systems, prompt engineering, AI Agent architectures and design patterns 
• Understanding of common AI platform patterns such as embeddings, RAG pipelines, or model integration 
• Awareness of performance and reliability considerations for AI-backed systems 

Cloud & Infrastructure 

• Experience building SaaS platforms in public cloud environments (GCP preferred but not required) 
• Familiarity with microservices architectures and cloud-native systems 
• Basic understanding of networking concepts such as load balancing, service-to-service communication, and API gateways 

Operational Excellence 

• Experience operating production services in enterprise SaaS environments 
• Familiarity with observability practices (metrics, logging, tracing) 
• Experience participating in or leading incident response and root cause analysis 

Leadership & Collaboration Skills 

• Proven ability to build and develop strong engineering teams 
• Strong mentoring and coaching capabilities 
• Ability to guide engineers through technical design and problem solving 
• Excellent communication skills across engineering and product organizations 
• Ability to align teams around clear priorities and ownership 

What Success Looks Like in This Role 

• Hire a strong engineering team delivering reliable AI platform capabilities 
• Predictable and high-quality delivery of engineering initiatives for our core AI Agent platform 
• Clear engineering ownership and operational accountability 
* Customer obsession resulting in customer satisfaction with AI Agent quality, latency and accuracy 
• Scalable and maintainable platform architecture 
• Engineers effectively leveraging AI-assisted development tools 
• A culture of accountability, collaboration, and technical excellence