Senior Engineering Manager - Voice AI

Gladly • San Francisco, CA

1d • $183,000 - $215,000 • Remote

About The Position

About Gladly: Uniquely powered by Customer AI, Gladly is the only CX platform that puts the customer —not tickets —at the center of every conversation. Trusted by the world’s most customer-centric brands, including Crate & Barrel, Ulta Beauty, and Tumi, Gladly delivers radically efficient and radically personal experiences.Gladly was built for B2C leaders who refuse to compromise on operational efficiency or experience. With Gladly, every conversation feels uniquely tailored and instantly responsive, emotionally intelligent and operationally precise, deeply personal and effortlessly scalable. At the heart of our simply powerful platform is Gladly Customer AI —uniquely designed to maintain a single, continuous conversation across all channels while striking the perfect balance of technology and human connection. Learn more at www.gladly.ai . We're a remote-first company that values flexibility, curiosity, and collaboration. If you're excited about using AI to solve real problems for real people, Gladly offers a unique environment where advances in AI connect directly to products driving customer impact. About the AI Voice Team Our mission is to deliver natural, responsive, and reliable AI-powered voice conversations that match or exceed human agent quality — through the right inference infrastructure, latency optimization, and telephony platform. This team builds the voice intelligence layer of the platform: real-time response generation, inference orchestration, and voice system integrations. We're solving the hardest user experience problems in conversational AI — making sub-second LLM responses sound natural, keeping conversations flowing during inference latency, and ensuring every AI response is accurate and safe. Why This Role Is Special This is not just another AI job. As the Engineering Manager for AI Voice, you'll lead the team that makes AI phone conversations feel human . You'll architect systems that hide LLM latency, leverage inference providers for reliability and speed, and build closed-loop feedback systems to make AI responses trustworthy. We're not chasing hype — we're building a production-grade voice AI platform handling real customer service calls . This is your chance to have a huge technical and product impact, shaping how AI speaks to millions of customers at scale.

Requirements

• Engineering leadership experience: 5+ years leading teams delivering real-time, latency-sensitive systems at scale.
• Previous experience as a top performing software engineer at an AI or SaaS start-up.
• LLM infrastructure knowledge: Experience with inference providers, model orchestration, and managing AI backends in production.
• Technical depth: Strong foundation in backend systems, streaming architectures, and low-latency design patterns.
• Telephony platform knowledge : Experience working with Twilio and WebRTC.
• Bias for action: Proven ability to take ambiguous, early-stage ideas to production.
• Experience ensuring that all of your engineers with variable backgrounds, seniority and understanding of the domain advance in their career development .
• Collaborative leadership: Excellent communication skills — you mentor engineers and bridge between AI research, infrastructure, and product disciplines.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience with low-latency inference providers , or optimizing LLM response times.
• Voice or conversational AI expertise : latency hiding, utterance acknowledgement, barge-in handling, and natural conversation flow.
• Familiarity with observability tools (DataDog, LangSmith) for monitoring real-time AI performance.
• Experience with provider fallback patterns and resilient architectures.
• Open-source contributions, public talks, or thought leadership in voice AI or real-time systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead a product team building the voice AI stack : real-time inference, latency management, continuous quality monitoring and performance tracking.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, AI Core and AI Research teams to define what "great AI voice experience" means — from first greeting to complex issue resolution.
• Drive innovation — stay on the cutting edge of low-latency LLMs, voice-optimized models, and real-time AI architectures.
• Develop and implement engineering processes and best practices.
• Take ownership of projects throughout their full cycle including inception, planning, execution, testing and maintenance.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of quality obsession, AI advancement, latency minimization, reliability, and thoughtful system design.

Benefits

• Competitive salaries, stock options, and comprehensive benefits
• Generous paid time off, parental leave, and home office stipends
• A fully remote work environment with opportunities for in-person team gatherings
• A strong commitment to professional growth and an inclusive workplace where diverse perspectives thrive

What This Job Offers

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