Sr. Manager, Engineering

About this role

About Dialpad
Dialpad is the AI platform for customer experience, built to resolve customer problems in real time across voice and digital. Our AI agents learn from your best human agents and improve with every interaction, helping organizations understand their customers, deliver better experiences, increase operational efficiencies, and build a lasting competitive advantage.

Unlike legacy systems built to route and answer, or standalone agentic bot vendors built to deflect, Dialpad was built to resolve. Our AI agents and human agents operate on a single platform with shared context, allowing Agentic AI to resolve issues, advance deals, and eliminate busywork through automation while seamlessly handing conversations to humans when needed, with full context preserved.

Market-leading brands, including Randstad, Motorola Solutions, Netflix, the San Diego Padres, the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, and Cal Athletics, trust Dialpad. Dialpad is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, and T-Mobile.

Being a Dialer
At Dialpad, AI isn’t just a feature; it’s how our teams do their best work every day. We put powerful AI tools in every employee’s hands so they can move faster, think bigger, and achieve more.

We believe every conversation matters. And we’ve built the platform that turns those conversations into insight and action, for our customers and ourselves.

We look for people who are intensely curious and hold themselves to a high bar. Our ambition is significant, and achieving it requires a team that operates at the highest level. We seek individuals who embody our core traits: Scrappy, Curious, Optimistic, Persistent, and Empathetic.

Your role
Dialpad is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the team at the very core of the Dialpad experience: calling. Reporting directly to the VP of Engineering, you'll own the calling experience end-to-end: frontend, backend, and hardware devices (first-class desk phones, Room Phones, ATAs, and DECT solutions). You'll lead senior engineers across Dialpad's global offices. While this is primarily a leadership role, you'll be hands-on at the start, shipping code across the frontend and backend alongside your team.

This role sits at the intersection of two crafts. The first is real-time audio engineering: your team builds on WebRTC and SIP, where the art is in making millions of live conversations feel effortless even when networks aren't. Media quality, low latency, and performance define success here: in the call center industry, every millisecond matters. That bar is even higher in modern agentic real-time AI experiences, where AI agents answer, route, and resolve live calls; a beat of silence before the AI responds is the difference between a natural conversation and a robotic one. The second is contact center depth: the features this market considers table stakes (skill-based routing, call transcription, agent assist) are being reinvented with AI, and this team ships them at scale in a fast-moving market. Audio and screen sharing (agent screen capture, one-click sharing) are the dominant use cases, with the contact center at the center of it all.

This is a high-impact, strategically important role with a direct line to Dialpad's revenue.

What you'll do

• Lead and grow a team of highly experienced engineers through regular one-on-ones, coaching, performance reviews, and career development.

• Define the 1–3 year vision and roadmap for the team alongside your product partners.

• Own large projects end-to-end: requirements gathering, planning, resourcing, and delivery.

• Lead the calling frontend, maintaining a best-in-class experience for human agents working hand in hand with our AI agents: seamless handoffs, full context, and real-time assist in every conversation.

• Lead the calling backend through a multi-year architectural evolution: hardening critical call paths for reliability, defining SLOs and tiers of criticality, and decomposing the platform into well-bounded, event-driven, containerized services, rolled out gradually and safely with zero disruption to live calls.

• Grow Dialpad's hardware ecosystem (desk phones, Room Phones, ATAs, DECT), keeping devices first-class citizens of the calling experience.

• Evaluate technical designs and architecture proposals with an eye toward scale and rapidly evolving business needs.

• Partner with geographically distributed peers (engineering managers, tech leads, product managers, designers, and support engineers) to align on engineering-wide priorities.

• Champion AI-native development: our engineers are expected to use frontier models, AI agents, and the best AI tools we provide to build their components at production level (documentation and e2e test automation included) at lightning speed. You'll set that pace and lead by example.

• Drive effective engineering processes and ensure features ship on time with the highest quality.

• Scale the team by recruiting candidates from diverse backgrounds.

• Stay hands-on when needed: code reviews, design discussions, and technical implementation.

Skills you'll bring

• 5+ years leading high-performing engineering teams, including shipping cross-functional or multi-team projects.

• 10+ years professional experience as an engineer or engineering leader.

• Experience with real-time communications (WebRTC, SIP, VoIP); you know your way around echo cancellation, call routing, or shaving milliseconds off outbound call setup.

• Strong contact center (CCaaS) domain knowledge (routing, queues, IVR) and a view on how AI is reshaping it: AI skill-based routing, real-time agent assist, auto-QA.

• Full-stack fluency: a modern JavaScript framework (we use Vue 3 + TypeScript) and Python or Java on the backend.

• Experience with cloud-native architectures: microservices, containerization, and orchestration (Google Cloud Platform a plus).

• Experience evolving high-traffic production systems: decomposing monoliths into services,…