Senior Director of Engineering, AI Agents

Podium

. Own the technical architecture and roadmap for Podium's AI agent platform, including orchestration, tool-use frameworks, memory, and reasoning systems .

Posted 9/18/2026full-timeRemote • Utah • United StatesSeniorWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in AI architecture and engineering leadership, with a focus on building and scaling production agent systems. Proficient in cross-functional collaboration to align technical capabilities with business outcomes and drive innovation in agent workflows.

Highest-signal resume keywords

AI ArchitectureProduction Agent SystemsCross-Functional CollaborationEvaluation SystemsHands-On Leadership

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Hard Skills

Software EngineeringApplied AI ArchitectureOrchestration FrameworksLatency ManagementEvaluation System ScalingPrompt EngineeringAgent TestingContext ManagementTool-Calling PatternsNon-Deterministic Software

Soft Skills

Communication SkillsTeam LeadershipCollaboration

Tools & Technologies

Claude CodeCodexCursorLLM-Powered SystemsAgentic Systems

Industry Keywords

SaaSVoice AIConversational AIMultimodal SystemsSMB Customers

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the technical architecture and roadmap for Podium's AI agent platform, including orchestration, tool-use frameworks, memory, and reasoning systems
Lead and grow a team of engineers building and operating production agent systems
Set the technical bar and remain hands-on in design, code, and incident response
Build and mature offline and online evaluation infrastructure, quality metrics, and feedback loops
Drive new agent capabilities and workflows from “0 to 1,” then harden systems for reliability, latency, and cost at scale
Partner with Product to translate business outcomes into agent capabilities and prioritized technical bets
Partner with Infrastructure and Platform teams on observability, cost efficiency, resilience, model routing, latency budgets, fallback behavior, and guardrails
Work directly with customers and Sales, CS, and Support teams to identify where agents succeed or fail and feed insights into the roadmap
Establish best practices for prompt/context engineering, agent testing, safety, guardrails, and responsible autonomous-system deployment
Represent AI Agents engineering in leadership discussions and make build-vs-buy and model-vs-vendor tradeoffs

Requirements

What you’ll need

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 serving real users at real volume with real reliability requirements
Deep fluency in applied AI architecture, including orchestration frameworks, tool-calling/function-calling patterns, RAG, and context management
Understanding of tradeoffs between latency, cost, and quality
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 with Product, Infrastructure, and customer-facing teams
Communication skills to align technical decisions with business outcomes
Hands-on fluency with modern AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar
Experience building agent systems for customer-facing, revenue-critical workflows (preferred)
Familiarity with voice AI, conversational AI, or real-time multimodal systems (preferred)
Experience in a high-growth SaaS or vertical software company, ideally serving SMB customers (preferred)
A point of view on the frontier of agentic AI (preferred)

Benefits

Comp & perks

Join the leaders in AI agents, building on a product trusted by 60,000+ businesses
Career-defining growth with ownership of a product area at the center of Podium's future
Build with world-class talent
Make a real impact on local business
Equal employment opportunities