Senior Director of Engineering, AI Agents

Podium • Lehi, UT

5d

About The Position

Podium is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead the AI Agents product, transforming it from a fast-growing platform into the industry-defining agent infrastructure for local businesses. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring both building new systems from scratch and operating them at scale. The successful candidate will architect and ship systems that enable AI agents to reason, act, and improve over time, while also building the team and organizational capacity to manage these systems reliably across numerous customer workflows and business verticals.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in engineering leadership roles (Director, Head of Engineering, or equivalent hands-on lead scope).
• Direct experience building and operating production LLM-powered or agentic systems serving real users at scale with reliability requirements.
• Deep fluency in applied AI architecture: orchestration frameworks, tool-calling/function-calling patterns, RAG and context management, and understanding tradeoffs between latency, cost, and quality.
• Proven track record of building and scaling evaluation systems for non-deterministic software.
• Experience leading both '0 to 1' builds and '1 to scale' hardening.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with Product, Infrastructure, and customer-facing teams.
• Effective communication skills to align technical decisions with business outcomes.
• Genuine, hands-on fluency with modern AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor).

Nice To Haves

• Experience building agent systems for customer-facing, revenue-critical workflows (sales, support, scheduling).
• Familiarity with voice AI, conversational AI, or real-time multimodal systems.
• Experience operating in a high-growth SaaS or vertical software company, especially serving SMB customers.
• A well-defined perspective on the frontier of agentic AI and its leverage for Podium.

Responsibilities

• Owning the technical architecture and roadmap for Podium's AI agent platform, including orchestration, tool-use frameworks, memory, and reasoning systems.
• Leading and growing a team of engineers focused on building and operating production agent systems, maintaining high technical standards and remaining hands-on in design, code, and incident response.
• Building and maturing evaluation infrastructure, including offline and online evaluation harnesses, quality metrics, and feedback loops for confident agent improvement.
• Driving the development of new agent capabilities and workflows from initial concept ('0 to 1') to hardening for reliability, latency, and cost at scale ('1 to scale').
• Partnering with Product Management to translate business outcomes into agent capabilities and technical priorities.
• Collaborating with Infrastructure/Platform teams to ensure agent systems are observable, cost-efficient, and resilient, covering aspects like model routing, latency, fallback behavior, and guardrails.
• Engaging directly with customers and customer-facing teams to understand agent performance in the field and inform the roadmap.
• Establishing best practices for prompt/context engineering, agent testing, safety, guardrails, and responsible deployment of autonomous systems.
• Representing AI Agents engineering in leadership discussions, providing a clear technical narrative, identifying risks, and making build-vs-buy and model-vs-vendor decisions.

Benefits

• Equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, genetic information, marital status or veteran status.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed