Senior Director of Engineering - AI Agents

About the Role:

Podium built the AI Employee local businesses now depend on to answer every lead, book every appointment, and win the moments that used to slip through the cracks. It's not a chatbot bolted onto a CRM — it's an autonomous teammate that qualifies leads, holds real conversations, and closes the loop from first message to booked revenue, 24/7.

We're looking for a Senior Director of Engineering to take ownership of our AI Agents product and turn it from a fast-growing platform into the industry-defining agent infrastructure for local business. This is a hands-on leadership role — equal parts zero-to-one builder and scale-up operator. You'll architect and ship the systems that let our agents reason, act, and get better over time, while building the team and the org-level muscle to run these systems reliably at massive scale, across thousands of customer-facing workflows and business verticals.

What you will be doing:

• Owning the technical architecture and roadmap for Podium's AI agent platform — the orchestration layer, tool-use frameworks, memory, and reasoning systems that power customer-facing agents across every industry vertical we serve
• Leading and growing a team of engineers building and operating production agent systems, setting the technical bar and staying hands-on in design, code, and incident response where it matters most
• Building and maturing our evaluation infrastructure — the offline and online eval harnesses, quality metrics, and feedback loops that let us ship agent improvements with confidence instead of guesswork
• Driving the "0 to 1" build-out of new agent capabilities and workflows, then the "1 to scale" work of hardening those systems for reliability, latency, and cost as usage grows into the tens of millions of conversations
• Partnering closely with Product to translate business outcomes (response time, conversion, show rate, revenue recovered) into agent capabilities and prioritized technical bets
• Partnering with Infrastructure/Platform teams to ensure agent systems are observable, cost-efficient, and resilient at scale — this includes model routing, latency budgets, fallback behavior, and guardrails
• Working directly with customers and customer-facing teams (Sales, CS, Support) to understand where agents succeed or fail in the field, and feeding that signal back into the roadmap
• Establishing best practices for prompt/context engineering, agent testing, safety and guardrails, and responsible deployment of autonomous systems in live customer environments
• Representing AI Agents engineering in leadership conversations — setting a clear technical narrative, calling out risk early, and making sound build-vs-buy and model-vs-vendor tradeoffs

What you should have:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in engineering leadership roles (Director, Head of Engineering, or equivalent scope as a hands-on lead)
• Direct experience building and operating production LLM-powered or agentic systems — not just prototypes, but systems serving real users at real volume with real reliability requirements
• Deep fluency in applied AI architecture: orchestration frameworks, tool-calling/function-calling patterns, RAG and context management, and the tradeoffs between latency, cost, and quality
• A track record of building and scaling evaluation systems for non-deterministic software — you know how to measure agent quality, catch regressions, and make shipping decisions without waiting for perfect certainty
• Experience leading both "0 to 1" builds and "1 to scale" hardening — you've stood up something from nothing and you've also kept something running under real production load
• Strong instincts for working cross-functionally with Product, Infrastructure, and customer-facing teams, and the communication skills to align technical decisions with business outcomes
• Genuine, hands-on fluency with modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar) as part of how you and your team build

What we hope you have:

• Experience building agent systems specifically for customer-facing, revenue-critical workflows (sales, support, scheduling, or similar)
• Familiarity with voice AI, conversational AI, or real-time multimodal systems
• Experience operating in a high-growth SaaS or vertical software company, ideally one serving SMB customers
• A point of view on the frontier of agentic AI — what's changing fast, what's overhyped, and where the real leverage is for a company like Podium

Why you'll love working here:

Podium is the best place to work to:

• Join the leaders in AI agents — you'll be building on top of a product already trusted by 60,000+ businesses to run their AI Employee, with a real mandate and real usage to learn from
• Unlock career-defining growth — this role owns a product area at the center of Podium's future, with the scope and visibility that comes with it
• Build with world-class talent — join a team of engineers who ship fast, use AI tooling seriously, and care as much about outcomes as elegance
• Make a real impact on local business — the agents you build directly help local businesses respond faster, convert more leads, and grow revenue without adding headcount

Podium is an equal opportunity employer. Podium provides 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.