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.

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

1-2 years 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 fully remote for candidates who reside outside the 50 mile radius of our San Ramon office. For candidates who reside within 50 miles of our San Ramon location, this role is Hybrid and would require 3 days a week (M, W, TH) in our San Ramon office.

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 the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the job across the United States. Your recruiter can share more about the specific compensation package during your hiring process.

Additionally, the total compensation package for this position may also include an annual performance bonus, stock, and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans.

Our total reward package also includes:

Health, dental, and vision coverage, beginning on the first day of employment. Five9 covers 100% of the employee portion of the health, dental and vision coverage and shares a high portion of the dependent cost. We also offer Short & Long-Term Disability, Basic Life Insurance, and a 401k saving plan with employer matching.
Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources in areas such as: therapy, coaching and self-guided mindfulness exercises for all covered employees and their covered dependents.
Generous employee stock purchase plan.
Paid Time Off, Company paid holidays, paid volunteer hours and 12 weeks paid parental leave.

All compensation and benefits are subject to the requirements and restrictions set forth in the applicable plan documents and any written agreements between the parties.

The US base salary range for this role is below.

$133,000—$391,500 USD

Five9 embraces diversity and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.  The more inclusive we are, the better we are.  Five9 is an equal opportunity employer.

View our privacy policy, including our privacy notice to California residents here: https://www.five9.com/pt-pt/legal.

Note: Five9 will never request that an applicant send money as a prerequisite for commencing employment with Five9.