Head of Voice AI
Job Summary
Exotel is a Customer Engagement Platform for businesses built for interactions handled by both people and AI agents.
We provide the stack behind those interactions - voice SMS WhatsApp RCS and the telephony infrastructure underneath it. Our customers use Exotel to sell support collect payments resolve issues and serve millions of their own customers.
Voice AI is a major part of where this is going.
Our Voice AI agents answer and place phone calls reason with an LLM integrate with customer systems and complete tasks. Customers are already running them in production and paying us by the minute.
The market is moving fast. Models are getting better and cheaper latency is falling and new competitors appear constantly. We need someone who can build the business at that pace.
You will build and run Voice AI as a business.
You own the product revenue and gross margin: where we play what we build what we price who we pursue and what we walk away from.
You will run a self-contained pod of Product Managers engineers delivery and forward-deployed engineers. The pod owns the journey from the first customer conversation to a production voice agent.
You are not here to execute a roadmap. You decide what the roadmap should be.
Decide where we should win and where we shouldnt.
Build a clear view of:
- The segments and use cases worth pursuing.
- Our real advantages and where they are weak.
- What we should build buy or deliberately leave alone.
Test that view through customers deals and losses. The roadmap should follow from it.
Set the bar for what a great voice AI product looks like.
Decide:
- Which workflows agents should handle end-to-end.
- What belongs in the product versus customer-specific work.
- How agents integrate with the tools and systems customers already use.
- Where to use the best model versus the cheapest model that gets the job done.
- What to build ourselves and what to buy.
You own the customer experience. If an agent is slow interrupts gets something wrong or fails to complete a task it is your problem to solve.
Own the number.
- Build the plan with GTM and Finance. Know where revenue will come from by quarter segment and account.
- Set pricing and the deal floor. Know the economics of the deals you approve.
- When the number is off plan know why before anyone asks.
- The cost of a minute is a product decision.
- Model choice routing caching infrastructure and architecture all affect margin. Build the cost model set the cost-per-minute target and drive it down.
- Balance quality latency and cost. You own the trade-offs.
- Stay close to the market.
- Join strategic customer calls. Run important demos. Listen to real calls and lost deals.
- Understand why we win and lose then feed that back into the product positioning and pricing.
- We operate as self-contained pods. Each pod owns a problem end to end across product engineering delivery and forward-deployed engineering.
- You run the Voice AI pod. Set its direction keep it focused and remove the dependencies that slow it down.
- Make the people in it better. Raise the bar for product judgment engineering decisions and customer understanding.
- The goal is a team that can make good decisions ship quickly and own the outcome.
- Customers will need hands-on help early on. Your job is to make that need shorter over time.
- Decide what FDEs build for a customer what becomes a product capability and what should never be built again.
- Look for patterns across customers and drive FDE hours per customer down.
We care about what you have actually owned more than your previous title.
You have:
- Built and shipped an AI product that paying customers use in production at meaningful scale.
- Set product direction rather than just executing someone elses roadmap.
- Owned revenue gross margin or a P&L.
- Made pricing and margin decisions yourself.
- Built or deeply understood your products unit economics.
- Worked directly with sales and customers on important deals.
- Led strong Product Managers and engineers run a startup or operated with high autonomy.
- Made decisions with incomplete information and owned the outcome.
- Killed things you had previously backed when the evidence changed.
- Speech conversational AI or real-time media.
- LLM inference economics model routing caching or self-hosting.
- CPaaS contact centres or telephony.
- Enterprise products in India South East Asia or the Gulf.
- Building products alongside delivery or forward-deployed engineering teams.
- The market will change faster than the plan. We expect you to change the plan.
- You will sometimes do work below your level because it needs doing. Run the demo. Fix the pricing sheet. Listen to failed calls. Take the customer escalation.
- You will spend real time with customers.
- We publish the numbers internally. Good quarters and bad quarters are both visible.
- We care about outcomes not job boundaries.
- We know where we want to win where we dont and why.
- The strategy is clear and the roadmap follows from it.
- Customers get to production faster and agents complete more of the jobs they are given.
- Conversation quality latency and reliability have materially improved.
- Cost per minute is falling and margins are improving.
- Custom work is falling as FDE learnings become product capabilities.
- The pod operates with high agency and doesnt need constant intervention.
- Revenue is growing and customers are staying.
The numbers should confirm the story: revenue and growth gross margin cost per minute NRR time to production FDE hours and task completion.
Required Experience:
Director