Senior Agent Design Engineer

PolyAI automates customer service through lifelike voice assistants that let customers lead a conversation. Our voice assistants make it possible for businesses to deliver outstanding customer service that rivals their human agents. Our customers, which include the world’s leading logos, are expanding how they use our platform, driving automation of critical customer service operations and integrating PolyAI into their daily customer service workflows.  We're looking for a Senior Agent Design Engineer to lead a multidisciplinary team of Agent Designers and Agent Design Engineers. This is a hands-on manager role for someone who sits comfortably at the intersection of conversational UX design, technical implementation, and team leadership–someone who thinks critically about how conversations should feel, not just how systems should work. At PolyAI, Agent Design means owning the full picture: mapping user journeys, shaping dialogue and tone, and building the underlying systems that power them (prompting, tool access, and context engineering). If you've spent your career frustrated by the artificial gap between design and engineering, this role was built for you. What you'll do: Lead and develop your team Manage and mentor a team of Agent Designers and Agent Design Engineers, raising the bar on design craft, technical execution, and team productivity Set clear objectives, provide thoughtful feedback, and help push team members toward the fulfillment of individual and company goals Foster a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and continuous improvement, with user-centered thinking at its core Own the quality of conversational experiences Act as a major, hands-on contributor in the design and implementation of  conversational UX across the AI agents being built by your team, setting standards for tone, clarity, naturalness, and consistency Ensure every experience your team ships feels intuitive and human, not scripted and robotic Drive the discipline forward Guide your team through the full lifecycle: from user journey mapping and conversation design through to implementation, including prompting, tool integration, context engineering, testing, and iteration Build and evolve processes that balance creative exploration with reliable delivery, keeping your team accountable to rapidly evolving processes and workflow standards. Partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Project Management to advocate for design quality throughout the development lifecycle, while also remaining ruthlessly practical about project resource allocation and staffing needs Stay at the leading edge of agentic AI workflows, actively experimenting with new tooling and patterns and bringing what you learn back into how the team builds What we're looking for: Required: 5+ years in a technical or design adjacent role at a tech company, with genuine hands on experience, whether in conversational design, software engineering, or a combination of both 2+ years of people management experience or a proven track record of leadership/mentorship/teaching, with evidence of developing junior collaborators into stronger practitioners while also managing a project portfolio with tight deadlines and nuanced requirements Experience managing external client relationships and stakeholder expectations Comfortable owning a team whose primary craft is conversation design. Whether you come from a design background and have grown into technical depth, or an engineering background and have developed strong UX and language sensibility, you must be genuinely invested in raising the bar on both Proficiency in Python sufficient to read, review, and meaningfully engage with what your team ships Experience with agentic AI workflows. You may not have shipped production multi agent systems, but you have experimented hands-on, formed opinions, and are capable of leading your team into new patterns as the field evolves Meticulous attention to detail around language, consistency, tone, and interaction quality Clear, inclusive communication: able to translate between design and engineering contexts fluently Preferred: Experience designing or deploying conversational AI assistants (voice or chat) using any platform or tooling Familiarity with LLMs in practice: prompt engineering, tool use, retrieval, context management Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks, harnesses, or orchestration patterns: multi-step reasoning, structured workflows, tool-calling agents Experience with agile delivery practices: sprint planning, retrospectives, capacity management   We provide a competitive salary range for this role - which is $110,000 – $125,000 - depending on level and experience. Candidates based in certain locations may be eligible for additional location based compensation. Please note this range is intended as a guide, not a guarantee. Final compensation will be based on individual qual