Senior Director of Engineering, AI Agents
About this role
Leaders who thrive on both zero-to-one building and large-scale operation will find an ideal challenge in shaping Podium's autonomous agent infrastructure. As the Senior Director of Engineering for AI Agents, you will own the technical architecture and roadmap for the platform that powers AI employees for tens of thousands of local businesses. This hands-on leadership role requires designing orchestration layers, tool-use frameworks, memory systems, and evaluation harnesses while growing the engineering organization.
Podium has scaled its AI agent platform rapidly, achieving significant growth in a short timeframe and deploying thousands of AI employees across industries like auto, home services, and aesthetics. You will work closely with product and infrastructure teams to handle millions of customer conversations with a focus on reliability, latency, and cost efficiency. The ideal person combines deep technical fluency in applied AI architecture with strong cross-functional communication and a practical approach to building robust, production-grade agent systems.
What you will do
- Own the technical architecture and roadmap for Podium's AI agent platform, covering orchestration, tool-use frameworks, memory, and reasoning systems.
- Lead and grow a team of engineers building and operating production agent systems while staying hands-on in design, code, and incident response.
- Build and mature evaluation infrastructure, including offline and online eval harnesses, quality metrics, and feedback loops for agent improvements.
- Drive the zero-to-one build-out of new agent capabilities and the subsequent scaling work to harden systems for reliability, latency, and cost.
- Partner closely with product teams to translate business outcomes like response time, conversion, and recovered revenue into prioritized technical bets.
- Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure agent systems are observable, cost-efficient, and resilient with proper model routing and fallback behavior.
- Establish best practices for prompt engineering, agent testing, safety guardrails, and responsible deployment in live customer environments.
What you need
- Possess 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in engineering leadership roles such as Director or Head of Engineering.
- Demonstrate direct experience building and operating production LLM-powered or agentic systems serving real users at volume with high reliability requirements.
- Bring deep fluency in applied AI architecture, including orchestration frameworks, function-calling patterns, RAG, context management, and latency-cost tradeoffs.
- Show a track record of building and scaling evaluation systems for non-deterministic software to measure quality and catch regressions.
- Have experience leading both zero-to-one product builds and the subsequent scaling and hardening under production load.
- Exhibit strong cross-functional instincts for working with product, infrastructure, and customer-facing teams to align technical decisions with business outcomes.
- Maintain genuine, hands-on fluency with modern AI coding tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor.
Nice to have
- Experience building agent systems specifically for customer-facing, revenue-critical workflows such as sales, support, or scheduling
- Familiarity with voice AI, conversational AI, or real-time multimodal systems
- Experience operating in a high-growth SaaS or vertical software company serving SMB customers
- A clear point of view on the frontier of agentic AI and where real leverage exists
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the work location policy for this role?
This position is based in Lehi, Utah, but is also open to remote work across the United States.
What does the engineering leadership scope look like here?
This is a hands-on leadership role that combines zero-to-one building with scale-up operations. You will own the technical architecture and roadmap for the AI agent platform while leading and growing a team of engineers.
What kind of systems will I be building and scaling?
You will build and operate production-grade LLM-powered and agentic systems, including orchestration layers, tool-use frameworks, memory, reasoning systems, and evaluation infrastructure serving thousands of customer-facing workflows.
Who will I work with cross-functionally in this position?
You will partner closely with product teams to translate business outcomes into technical bets, collaborate with infrastructure and platform teams on resilience and cost, and work with customer-facing teams to gather feedback from the field.