Director of Engineering

Regal•New York, NY

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Regal is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead two critical technical areas: real-time systems for live calls and applied AI research for call quality. This role involves leading two teams, one focused on real-time call delivery infrastructure and the other on proprietary model work for voice quality, end-of-utterance detection, voice activity detection, answering machine detection, and STT accuracy. The position is ideal for someone comfortable at the intersection of applied AI and real-time systems, working closely with the Staff+ AI Engineering lead as a peer and collaborator, with opportunities for broader engineering ownership as the team scales. The company, founded in 2020, is an AI Agent Platform backed by top investors and has partnered with major brands, processing over 500 million calls and driving significant revenue for customers. They emphasize an in-person culture in their Manhattan office.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in software engineering, with meaningful time in systems where latency and reliability are first-class constraints.
4+ years in engineering management, including experience managing mid to senior level engineers.
An entrepreneurial mindset, not looking for someone to run a playbook, but to help build it.
Comfortable operating at the boundary of research and engineering, knowing how to take a model improvement and turn it into a production system, and vice versa.
Strong communication skills, able to translate complex technical tradeoffs for product stakeholders and work effectively with researchers.
Excellent judgment on prioritization, knowing how to scope applied AI work against production impact.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with STT/TTS pipelines, voice activity detection, or telephony infrastructure.
Prior work on latency-sensitive ML inference systems in production.
Experience with LLM orchestration or agent evaluation frameworks.
Familiarity with WebSockets, real-time audio, or WebRTC.
Prior startup experience at the Series B–D stage.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop engineers across two teams, set expectations, support career growth, and run a tight hiring bar.
Own the technical roadmap for real-time call delivery and applied voice AI, in collaboration with Product, AI Engineering, and the broader eng leadership team.
Drive the applied AI roadmap: improving how AI agents talk to humans (pace, timing, accuracy, and warmth) and the contact center AI capabilities that make agents more effective in production.
Do whatever it takes to unblock your teams, whether that's changing a process, pair debugging, or cutting through cross-functional friction.
Work closely with product and engineering leadership to drive innovation and collaboration.
Maintain a strong peer relationship with Regal's AI Engineering lead, collaborative, not territorial. Applied model work intersects with research; managing that handoff well is part of the job.
Represent engineering in cross-functional conversations on voice quality, latency, and AI agent reliability.
Be actively involved in hiring: sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding.