Sr. Director, Agentic Engineering

Dialpad•San Francisco, CA

2d•$332,000 - $387,500•Onsite

About The Position

Dialpad is a leading AI-native business communications platform that unifies calling, messaging, meetings, and contact center solutions. Powered by AI that understands conversations in real time, Dialpad is used by over 70,000 companies globally. The company is at the forefront of the shift to Agentic AI, developing intelligent agents that automate workflows and accelerate revenue. The DAART initiative (Dialpad Agentic AI in Real Time) aims to redefine the capabilities of a communications platform. At Dialpad, AI is integral to how employees work, enabling them to move faster and achieve more. The company values intense curiosity, high standards, and a team that operates at the highest level, embodying traits such as Scrappy, Curious, Optimistic, Persistent, and Empathetic.

Requirements

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.
Shipped production systems where AI agents reason, act, coordinate, and safely execute workflows.
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.

Responsibilities

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.
Own the health, growth, and succession planning of the 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.
Build clear multi-team goals, robust QA and regression processes, and operational metrics (KPIs) that hold the platform to enterprise standards of quality and reliability.
Build 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.
Partner with peers in Product, Design, Applied Research, Support, and Finance to understand customer needs, maximize resource ROI, and eliminate cross-team friction and duplication.
Partner with 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.
Stay ahead of market and industry trends, using deep domain awareness to influence department-wide goals, milestones, and Dialpad's forward business strategy.