Senior Director of Engineering, AI Agents

At Podium we bring AI Employees to local businesses that turn every conversation into revenue. Trusted by 60000 businesses across Auto Home Services and Aesthetics Podium captures and converts leads 24/7 driving both new business and repeat customers.

In under 24 months we crossed $100M in AI Agent ARR scaling 300% year-over-year. During this time weve deployed 10000 AI employees to empower real business outcomes for our customers. Podium is building what we believe will be the most impactful AI employee ecosystem for local business.

Podium has been recognized as the Best AI Implementation by Inc. Magazine highlighted by OpenAI for building revenue-driving AI Agents and awarded the #1 AI Agent for Business Operations by G2.

Our growth is fueled by hiring exceptional people holding them to high standards and creating opportunities for them to grow and make an impact. Our operating principles guide daily behavior and ensure we hire people who will thrive at Podium. If youre hungry for growth aligned to our operating principles and ready to get to work you wont find a better place to learn and accelerate your career.

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. Its not a chatbot bolted onto a CRM its an autonomous teammate that qualifies leads holds real conversations and closes the loop from first message to booked revenue 24/7.

Were 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. Youll 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.

• Owning the technical architecture and roadmap for Podiums 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

• 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 youve stood up something from nothing and youve 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

• 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 whats changing fast whats overhyped and where the real leverage is for a company like Podium

Podium is the best place to work to:

• Join the leaders in AI agents youll be building on top of a product already trusted by 60000 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 Podiums 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.