Engineering Manager - Runtime Team

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.

We're looking for a talented Engineering Manager to join our Runtime Engineering team. Our Runtime team own the global infrastructure that powers real-time voice interactions.

In this role, you will focus on leading and developing a high-performing engineering team while staying close to the technical challenges at the core of our agentic process: streaming audio, transcribing speech, using LLMs and acting on their output, and synthesising natural voice. You will guide the team as they design and optimise systems across the media stack to deliver low-latency, secure, and reliable conversations.

Your leadership will directly shape the user experience of every call, driving down response times, improving comprehension, and ensuring we meet strict SLAs for performance and security.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, develop, and mentor a cross-functional team of 3 to 5 engineers, focusing on people management, career growth, and building a strong team culture
• Run team operations end to end, including sprint planning, review cycles, and performance management
• Drive hiring efforts to grow the team
• Partner closely with Product to translate business goals into an actionable roadmap
• Oversee the software architecture of our multitenant conversational AI platform
• Champion and enforce strong engineering standards
• Support technical decision-making, guiding engineers through design choices and architectural challenges

Requirements:

• 3+ years in a SaaS company with 5+ years of professional experience as a Software Engineer
• Proven experience managing a team or having direct reports
• Demonstrated ability to build and execute a roadmap
• Experience coaching engineers through technical challenges and architectural decisions
• Significant expertise in Python is a must
• Experience with GoLang is preferable but not essential
• Experience with React is a plus
• Experience with internal tooling, observability, and scaling distributed systems
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

This role also includes equity and competitive compensation based on experience.