Senior Manager, Engineering - AI Agents

Join us in bringing joy to customer experience. Five9 is a leading provider of cloud contact center software, bringing the power of cloud innovation to customers worldwide.

Living our values everyday results in our team-first culture and enables us to innovate, grow, and thrive while enjoying the journey together. We celebrate diversity and foster an inclusive environment, empowering our employees to be their authentic selves.

The Senior Manager, Engineering - AI Agents will lead the development and delivery of Five9’s AI Agent software platform, which provides customers with fully autonomous self-service agents for customer support, sales, and services use cases in the contact center. This is one of the hottest areas of application for AI Agent technology!

This role is responsible for building and managing a high-performing engineering team that develops scalable, reliable, and production-grade AI-powered systems used in real-time customer conversations.

You will be responsible for hiring and developing engineers, improving engineering processes, and enabling strong execution across the software development lifecycle. While this is a management role rather than an individual contributor position, the ideal candidate will bring strong technical credibility with engineers and guide architecture discussions, technical decisions, and engineering best practices.

You will collaborate closely with Product, SRE, Support, and other engineering teams to deliver an enterprise-grade platform while fostering a culture of operational excellence, ownership, and customer empathy.

This role is hybrid. 3 days a week (M, W, TH) in our San Francisco office is required.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Development

Hire, onboard, and grow a high-performing engineering teamof 4-8 engineers in the United States

Provide coaching, mentorship, and career development for engineers

Establish clear ownership, accountability, and engineering rigor

Conduct performance management, feedback, and growth planning

Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and operational excellence

Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders

Delivery & Execution

Lead planning and enable strong execution of engineering initiatives and product roadmap

Ensure projects are delivered predictably and with high quality

Focus on customer success, ensuring quality AI agent experiences with low latency and high accuracy

Break down large initiatives into achievable milestones

Partner with Product Management to prioritize work and manage trade-offs

Collaborate with Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) teams on AI agent implementations

Drive continuous improvement in development processes and team productivity

Technical Leadership

Perform code reviews, guide software architecture andtechnical decisions

Review technical designs and ensure sound engineering practices

Help teams make pragmatic technology decisions balancing innovation and reliability

Drive the team to manage customer expectations of uptime and performance by defining and reviewing SLO/SLI's, developing metrics to measuring as such and maintainingfor all the services

Ensure systems are scalable, maintainable, and production-ready

Operational Excellence

Promote strong service ownership and reliability culture

Ensure effective on-call practices and incident response processes

Drive root cause analysis and continuous reliability improvements

Partner with SRE teams to define SLIs, SLOs, and operational metrics

Handle customer escalations and issues related to AI Agent quality

Participate in on-call escalation rotations for provided services

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Work closely with Product, UX, SRE, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) and Support teams

Align engineering execution with product strategy and customer needs

Communicate engineering progress, risks, and technical decisions clearly to stakeholders

AI-Augmented Engineering Practices

Use of modern AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity, and represent “best in class” examples of how to effectively use it

Help the team adopt responsible and effective use of AI in software development workflows

Evaluate emerging developer AI tools and incorporate them wherebeneficial

Promote experimentation and learning around AI-enabled engineering practices

Required Experience

3+ years experience leading or managing software engineering teams

8+ years professional software development experience

Experience participatingin hiring and helping grow engineering teams

5+ years experience developing enterprise SaaS software

Strong background in distributed systems and modern software architectures

Experience or exposure to GenAI / LLM-based systems

Experience using or adopting AI-assisted software development tools

Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or similar

Strong track recordin hiring outstanding software development teams, through rigorous interviewing and vetting processes – either as the hiring manager or as part of interview panels

Desired Experience

1+ years of experience building AI Agent platforms for CX, including voicebots, chatbots and AI assistants

Technical Background

While this role is primarily management-focused, candidates must have sufficient technical depth to guide architecture and mentor engineers.

Software Engineering

• •Strong background in Java or JVM-based backend systems
• •Experience designing distributed systems or microservices architectures
• •Familiarity with API design (REST/gRPC) and scalable service architectures

AI / GenAI Platforms

• •Familiarity with LLM-based systems, prompt engineering, AI Agent architectures and design patterns
• •Understanding of common AI platform patterns such as embeddings, RAG pipelines, or model integration
• •Awareness of performance and reliability considerations for AI-backed systems

Cloud & Infrastructure

• •Experience building SaaS platforms in public cloud environments (GCP preferred but not required)
• •Familiarity with microservices architectures and cloud-native systems
• •Basic understanding of networking concepts such as load balancing, service-to-service communication, and API gateways

Operational Excellence

• •Experience operating production services in enterprise SaaS environments
• •Familiarity with observability practices (metrics, logging, tracing)
• •Experience participating in or leading incident response and root cause analysis

Leadership & Collaboration Skills

• •Proven ability to build and develop strong engineering teams
• •Strong mentoring and coaching capabilities
• •Ability to guide engineers through technical design and problem solving
• •Excellent communication skills across engineering and product organizations
• •Ability to align teams around clear priorities and ownership

What Success Looks Like in This Role

• •Hire a strong engineering team delivering reliable AI platform capabilities
• •Predictable and high-quality delivery of engineering initiatives for our core AI Agent platform
• •Clear engineering ownership and operational accountability
• * Customer obsession resulting in customer satisfaction with AI Agent quality, latency and accuracy
• •Scalable and maintainable platform architecture
• •Engineers effectively leveraging AI-assisted development tools
• •A culture of accountability, collaboration, and technical excellence

Work Location: This role is hybrid. 3 days a week (T, W, TH) in our San Francisco office is required.

As part of our continued commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Five9 supports pay transparency during the entire recruitment process. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate including, but not limited to: skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. The range displayed reflects