Senior Manager, Engineering - AI Agents

Role Overview

Senior Manager, Engineering - AI Agents at Five9 will lead the development and delivery of Five9’s AI Agent software platform for autonomous customer support, sales, and service use cases in the contact center. The role is responsible for building and managing a high-performing engineering team and ensuring scalable, reliable, production-grade AI-powered systems for real-time customer conversations.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Development

• Hire, onboard, and grow an engineering team of 4–8 engineers in the United States
• Coach, mentor, and support engineers’ career development
• Set clear ownership, accountability, and engineering rigor
• Drive performance management and growth planning
• Foster collaboration, innovation, and operational excellence

Delivery & Execution

• Lead planning and execution against engineering initiatives and the product roadmap
• Ensure predictable delivery and high-quality outcomes
• Deliver low-latency, high-accuracy AI agent experiences for customer success
• Break large initiatives into achievable milestones
• Partner with Product to prioritize work and manage trade-offs
• Collaborate with Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) teams on AI agent implementations
• Continuously improve development processes and team productivity

Technical Leadership

• Lead code reviews and guide architecture discussions and technical decisions
• Review technical designs and ensure sound engineering practices
• Make pragmatic technology choices balancing innovation with reliability
• Define and review SLOs/SLIs, metrics, and service performance expectations
• Ensure systems are scalable, maintainable, and production-ready

Operational Excellence

• Promote strong service ownership and reliability practices
• Ensure effective on-call and incident response
• Drive root-cause analysis and ongoing reliability improvements
• Partner with SRE to define operational metrics and SLIs/SLOs
• Handle AI Agent quality-related customer escalations and issues
• Participate in on-call escalation rotations

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with Product, UX, SRE, FDE, and Support
• Communicate progress, risks, and technical decisions clearly to stakeholders

Requirements

• Ability to lead a team and manage engineering execution across the software development lifecycle
• Strong technical credibility to guide architecture, design, and engineering best practices
• Experience defining and operating around SLOs/SLIs and reliability/uptime/performance metrics
• Collaboration with Product, SRE, Support, and other engineering teams

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building production AI systems for real-time, customer-facing conversations
• Experience with AI-augmented development tools to improve engineering productivity
• Demonstrated culture-building around ownership, operational excellence, and customer empathy