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Podium is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead the AI Agents product platform, which powers autonomous customer-facing agents for local businesses across auto, home services, and aesthetics verticals. The company has scaled to $100M+ AI Agent ARR in under 24 months and deployed 10,000 AI employees to customers.
In this hands-on leadership role, you will own the technical architecture and roadmap for Podium's AI agent platform, including orchestration layers, tool-use frameworks, memory systems, and reasoning infrastructure. You'll lead and grow an engineering team building production agent systems, set technical standards, and remain deeply involved in design, code review, and incident response.
Key responsibilities include:
- Architecting and shipping systems that enable agents to reason, act, and improve over time
- Building and maturing evaluation infrastructure with offline/online harnesses, quality metrics, and feedback loops to ship agent improvements with confidence
- Driving both "0 to 1" builds of new agent capabilities and "1 to scale" hardening for reliability, latency, and cost at tens of millions of conversations
- Partnering with Product to translate business outcomes (response time, conversion, show rate, revenue recovery) into technical priorities
- Collaborating with Infrastructure/Platform teams on observability, cost efficiency, resilience, model routing, latency budgets, and guardrails
- Engaging directly with customers and customer-facing teams (Sales, CS, Support) to understand real-world agent performance and feed insights into roadmap
- Establishing best practices for prompt engineering, agent testing, safety, guardrails, and responsible deployment of autonomous systems
- Representing AI Agents engineering in leadership discussions, articulating technical narrative, surfacing risks early, and making sound build-vs-buy and model-vs-vendor decisions
Requirements:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in engineering leadership roles (Director, Head of Engineering, or equivalent hands-on lead scope)
- Direct experience building and operating production LLM-powered or agentic systems serving real users at real volume with genuine reliability requirements (not prototypes)
- Deep fluency in applied AI architecture: orchestration frameworks, tool-calling/function-calling patterns, RAG and context management, and tradeoffs between latency, cost, and quality
- Track record of building and scaling evaluation systems for non-deterministic software; ability to measure agent quality, catch regressions, and make shipping decisions without perfect certainty
- Experience leading both "0 to 1" builds and "1 to scale" hardening efforts
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with Product, Infrastructure, and customer-facing teams; ability to align technical decisions with business outcomes
- Hands-on fluency with modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar) as part of your team's development practice
Desirable:
- Experience building agent systems for customer-facing, revenue-critical workflows (sales, support, scheduling)
- Familiarity with voice AI, conversational AI, or real-time multimodal systems
- Background in high-growth SaaS or vertical software companies serving SMB customers
- Informed perspective on frontier agentic AI: what's changing, what's overhyped, where real leverage exists
