Director of Software Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the complete technical architecture for the AI answering service, encompassing voice pipeline design, LLM orchestration, API integration layers, and real-time telephony infrastructure.

• Establish and enforce architectural standards to ensure the reliability, latency management, failure recovery, and scalability of AI systems across production environments.

• Make decisions on building, buying, or integrating new AI features; critically assess third-party models, frameworks, and platforms.

• Set and uphold technical documentation standards for all AI components, ensuring that accuracy is maintained as systems evolve.

• Engage actively in design reviews, code reviews, and technical spike activities, particularly for components that are high-risk or high-complexity.

• Lead the implementation of essential platform components as necessary, including AI service integrations, orchestration logic, and platform APIs.

• Diagnose and resolve intricate production challenges, such as inference latency, integration regressions, and telephony quality issues.

• Prototype and assess new AI capabilities prior to committing to full implementation cycles.

• Build and guide a high-performing engineering team as headcount expands; initially serve as both a technical lead and individual contributor.

• Recruit, onboard, and cultivate engineers with an emphasis on AI/ML fluency, software craftsmanship, and a commitment to continuous improvement.

• Promote a culture of psychological safety, technical rigor, and iterative delivery, where engineers learn from both failures and successes.

• Conduct regular one-on-one meetings, provide honest performance feedback, and develop personalized growth plans for team members.

• Act as the primary engineering accountability owner for outsourced development partners when required; set quality standards, review deliverables, and manage the integration of external work into production systems.

• Assess third-party AI platforms, cloud services, and tools; document vendor selection decisions.

• Ensure that security, compliance, and data governance requirements are incorporated into partner contracts and delivery expectations.

• Define and monitor engineering KPIs: deployment frequency, system uptime, latency SLAs, error rates, and mean time to recovery.

• Lead the team in adopting modern development practices, including AI-augmented development workflows, automated testing for ML outputs, and continuous deployment pipelines.

• Manage the engineering budget and resource allocation; clearly communicate trade-offs to the CTO.

• Collaborate with Product, Clinical, and Operations teams to translate requirements into reliable, scalable software, while constructively challenging timelines or scope when necessary.

• Work with the Director of Product Management to align the technical roadmap with product strategy and customer commitments.

• Represent engineering in executive discussions, translating technical realities into business risks and opportunities.

• Contribute to PerfectServe's overall AI strategy by sharing insights on emerging capabilities, architectural evolution, and responsible AI practices.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience, including at least 4 years in a technical leadership role with direct reports.

• Proven hands-on experience in designing and operating AI/ML or NLP systems in production, rather than merely overseeing teams that build them.

• Extensive knowledge of LLM integration patterns, prompt engineering pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and AI evaluation frameworks.

• Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture on AWS, including serverless, containerization, and event-driven patterns.

• Experience with real-time communication systems, such as voice/telephony infrastructure, VoIP, WebRTC, or similar technologies, is a significant advantage.

• Proficiency in at least two of the platform's core languages/frameworks: Python, C#, .NET, React.

• History of delivering high-reliability SaaS products with established uptime and latency requirements.

• Experience managing or collaborating with outsourced development partners, including quality oversight and accountability for delivery.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills; capable of presenting technical strategies clearly to non-technical executives.

🏝️ Benefits

• Remote-first work environment.

• Health, Dental, Vision, Life, and Disability Insurance options available from day one.

• 401K plan with matching and immediate vesting.

• 17 company holidays, 2 floating holidays, and a competitive paid time off policy.

• Opportunities for internal advancement.