Technical Lead Manager

Role overview A hands-on Technical Lead Manager role focused on building AI-powered customer experience agents, including voice, email, chat, and SMS, that enable self-service at scale for a fintech serving homeowners. The position combines people leadership with direct technical contribution, owning the AI technical strategy, shipping production code, and partnering with Product, Operations, and CX teams. It is remote-first within the United States, with occasional onsite presence at the company's Palo Alto headquarters.

Responsibilities - Define the AI technical strategy for customer experience, including evaluating frameworks, platforms, and vendor solutions. - Own the technical roadmap for voice, email, chat, and SMS agents that handle real customer interactions. - Write code alongside the team: review pull requests, prototype new agent capabilities, and debug production issues. - Partner with Product, CX, and Operations to identify where AI agents can replace or augment manual workflows, then ship the solutions. - Design reliable agent architectures covering orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and fallback handling at production scale. - Establish success metrics for agent performance and use data to prioritize the roadmap. - Lead and grow a small, senior engineering team, removing blockers and creating space for deep work. - Drive observability and reliability across the AI agent stack using modern evaluation tooling.

Requirements - 7+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems, including at least 2 years leading or managing engineering teams. - Proven experience developing and shipping LLM-powered, conversational AI, or agentic systems in real-world environments. - Track record of delivering customer-facing products end-to-end, from design through deployment, monitoring, and iteration. - Strong ability to partner with cross-functional stakeholders to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions. - Deep systems design expertise focused on reliable, observable, real-time services. - Hands-on experience with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, tool usage, and orchestration frameworks. - Comfort making build-versus-buy decisions and rigorously evaluating third-party platforms.

Nice to have - Familiarity with conversational AI infrastructure such as telephony, messaging APIs, or chat platforms at scale. - Experience with AI/ML evaluation and observability tooling.

Benefits and work setup - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans with FSA and HSA options. - Unlimited paid time off plus 10 company holidays. - Fully paid parental leave that supplements state Paid Family Leave, plus 4 weeks of fully paid transition time. - Meaningful equity and a 401(k) retirement plan, plus life and disability coverage. - Monthly stipends for internet and mobile, wellness perks, a home office reimbursement, and company-provided equipment. - Remote-first with flexibility; some roles may require one onsite day per week at the Palo Alto headquarters. - Must reside in one of the approved U.S. states listed in the job posting.