Senior Engineering Manager, AI Agents

 The Senior Engineering Manager, 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. 

You will make use of AI coding assistants, specifically Claude Code, to produce code as well as work with the team using these tools.  

• 1+ years of Experience in software development for GenAI platforms for Customer Support/Customer Experience is REQUIRED 

• 5+ years of software development experience, ideally in Java 

• 5+ years of experience in enterprise SaaS software development 

• 10+ years of software development experience 

• Bachelors or advanced degree in computer science, computer engineering or similar 
  
  
• Experience using Claude Code for software development 

• Ability to drive end-to-end architecture for complex platforms, from requirements → design → implementation → deployment. 

• Skilled at creating architecture docs, ADRs, technical deep-dives, and communicating trade-offs clearly. 

• Strong understanding of eventing, CQRS, streaming, pub/sub, state machines, and distributed consensus patterns. 

• Experience in using AI to accelerate software development, using tools like Claude Code or Microsoft CoPilot 

• Ability to mentor and elevate teams—code reviews, design guidance, pairing, coaching junior engineers. 

• Strong communication skills; capable of explaining technical decisions to: 

• Engineering leadership 

• Product & UX 

• Support, SRE, QA, and Solutions Engineering 

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across orgs to deliver complete, integrated product experiences. 

• Ability to set technical direction for the platform and influence roadmaps. 

• Ownership mentality across the entire SDLC—design → implementation → CI/CD → monitoring → production operations. 

• Exceptional judgment in balancing innovation vs reliability, short-term velocity vs long-term maintainability. 

• Ability to decompose large initiatives into deliverable components, driving execution with high accountability.