Senior Director of Engineering, AI Agents

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

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the technical architecture and roadmap for Podium's AI agent platform, which includes orchestration, tool-use frameworks, memory, and reasoning systems.

• Lead and expand a team of engineers responsible for developing and maintaining production agent systems.

• Establish the technical standards and remain actively involved in design, coding, and incident management.

• Develop and enhance both offline and online evaluation infrastructure, quality metrics, and feedback mechanisms.

• Propel new agent capabilities and workflows from conception to execution, then optimize systems for reliability, latency, and scalability.

• Collaborate with the Product team to convert business objectives into agent functionalities and prioritize technical initiatives.

• Work alongside Infrastructure and Platform teams on aspects such as observability, cost-effectiveness, resilience, model routing, latency budgets, fallback behavior, and safety measures.

• Engage directly with customers and Sales, Customer Success, and Support teams to assess agent performance and provide insights for the roadmap.

• Set best practices for prompt/context engineering, agent testing, safety protocols, and responsible deployment of autonomous systems.

• Represent AI Agents engineering in leadership discussions and evaluate build-versus-buy and model-versus-vendor decisions.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience, with substantial time spent in engineering leadership positions (Director, Head of Engineering, or equivalent as a hands-on leader).

• Proven experience in building and operating production systems driven by LLM or agentic technologies that serve real users with significant reliability demands.

• Extensive knowledge of applied AI architecture, including orchestration frameworks, tool/function-calling patterns, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and context management.

• Insight into the trade-offs between latency, cost, and quality.

• A history of developing and scaling evaluation systems for non-deterministic software.

• Experience leading projects from "0 to 1" and refining them from "1 to scale."

• Strong ability to collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Infrastructure, and customer-facing teams.

• Effective communication skills to align technical choices with business goals.

• Proficiency with modern AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar technologies.

• Experience in creating agent systems for customer-facing, revenue-critical applications (preferred).

• Familiarity with voice AI, conversational AI, or real-time multimodal systems (preferred).

• Background in a fast-growing SaaS or vertical software organization, particularly those serving SMB clients (preferred).

• An informed perspective on the cutting edge of agentic AI (preferred).

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses.

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.

• Flexible work hours and remote work options.

• Opportunities for professional growth and development.

• A vibrant company culture that values diversity and inclusion.