Senior Agent Design Engineer

June 11, 2026

<div class="content-intro">PolyAI automates customer service through lifelike voice assistants that let customers lead a conversation. Our voice assistants make it possible for businesses to deliver outstanding customer service that rivals their human agents. Our customers, which include the world’s leading logos, are expanding how they use our platform, driving automation of critical customer service operations and integrating PolyAI into their daily customer service workflows. </div>We're looking for a Senior Agent Design Engineer to lead a multidisciplinary team of Agent Designers and Agent Design Engineers. This is a hands-on manager role for someone who sits comfortably at the intersection of conversational UX design, technical implementation, and team leadership–someone who thinks critically about how conversations should feel, not just how systems should work. At PolyAI, Agent Design means owning the full picture: mapping user journeys, shaping dialogue and tone, and building the underlying systems that power them (prompting, tool access, and context engineering). If you've spent your career frustrated by the artificial gap between design and engineering, this role was built for you. <h2>What you'll do:</h2> <h3>Lead and develop your team</h3> <ul> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Manage and mentor a team of Agent Designers and Agent Design Engineers, raising the bar on design craft, technical execution, and team productivity</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Set clear objectives, provide thoughtful feedback, and help push team members toward the fulfillment of individual and company goals</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Foster a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and continuous improvement, with user-centered thinking at its core</li> </ul> <h3>Own the quality of conversational experiences</h3> <ul> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Act as a major, hands-on contributor in the design and implementation of conversational UX across the AI agents being built by your team, setting standards for tone, clarity, naturalness, and consistency</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ensure every experience your team ships feels intuitive and human, not scripted and robotic</li> </ul> <h3>Drive the discipline forward</h3> <ul> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Guide your team through the full lifecycle: from user journey mapping and conversation design through to implementation, including prompting, tool integration, context engineering, testing, and iteration</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Build and evolve processes that balance creative exploration with reliable delivery, keeping your team accountable to rapidly evolving processes and workflow standards.</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Project Management to advocate for design quality throughout the development lifecycle, while also remaining ruthlessly practical about project resource allocation and staffing needs</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Stay at the leading edge of agentic AI workflows, actively experimenting with new tooling and patterns and bringing what you learn back into how the team builds</li> </ul> <h2>What we're looking for:</h2> <h3>Required:</h3> <ul> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">5+ years in a technical or design adjacent role at a tech company, with genuine hands on experience, whether in conversational design, software engineering, or a combination of both</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">2+ years of people management experience or a proven track record of leadership/mentorship/teaching, with evidence of developing junior collaborators into stronger practitioners while also managing a project portfolio with tight deadlines and nuanced requirements</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience managing external client relationships and stakeholder expectations</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Comfortable owning a team whose primary craft is conversation design. Whether you come from a design background and have grown into technical depth, or an engineering background and have developed strong UX and language sensibility, you must be genuinely invested in raising the bar on both</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Proficiency in Python sufficient to read, review, and meaningfully engage with what your team ships</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience with agentic AI workflows. You may not have shipped production multi agent systems, but you have experimented hands-on, formed opinions, and are capable of leading your team into new patterns as the field evolves</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Meticulous attention to detail around language, consistency, tone, and interaction quality</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Clear, inclusive communication: able to translate between design and engineering contexts fluently</li> </ul> <h3>Preferred:</h3> <ul> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience designing or deploying conversational AI assistants (voice or chat) using any platform or tooling</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Familiarity with LLMs in practice: prompt engineering, tool use, retrieval, context management</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks, harnesses, or orchestration patterns: multi-step reasoning, structured workflows, tool-calling agents</li> <li style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience with agile delivery practices: sprint planning, retrospectives, capacity management</li> </ul> We provide a competitive salary range for this role - which is $110,000 – $125,000 - depending on level and experience. Candidates based in certain locations may be eligible for additional location based compensation. Please note this range is intended as a guide, not a guarantee. Final compensation will be based on individual qualifications, relevant experience, and the scope of the role. In addition to salary, this position includes equity in the business, giving you the opportunity to share in the company’s long-term success. The listed expectations reflect what we're hiring for, so we encourage you to review the job description carefully. <hr> <h1>Benefits</h1> 💰 Participation in the company’s employee share options plan 🏥 100% of Single Cost (employee) and 70% of Dependent for medical, dental & vision 👪 Life Insurance ◻️ STD and LTD 💰 The opportunity to contribute to the company's 401k plan 🏝 Flexible PTO policy + 11 designated company holidays 📚 Annual learning and development allowance 🏡 We’re all about making WFH work for you - that’s why you’ll receive a one-off WFH allowance when you join. Offering perks like noise-cancelling headphones or a comfortable desk chair to boost your comfort and focus! 🧡 Enhanced parental leave <a href="https://emojipedia.org/family-man-woman-girl/">👨‍👩‍👧</a> Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes <a href="https://emojipedia.org/cherry-blossom/">🌸</a> Menopause care programme with Maven<div class="content-conclusion"><hr> At PolyAI, we take great pride in our values - they guide everything we do. We believe that a strong culture leads to meaningful work and lasting impact. Our core values are: <img style="max-width: 100%;" src="https://emoji.slack-edge.com/T8GS4RNNM/only-the-best/63f754d467834139.gif" alt=":only-the-best:" width="30"> Only the best We expect the best from our people, we hire people that expect the best from themselves, and we nurture this drive for excellence. <img style="max-width: 100%;" alt=""><img style="max-width: 100%;" src="https://emoji.slack-edge.com/T8GS4RNNM/ownership/753f47103884882c.gif" alt=":ownership:" width="30"> Ownership We care deeply about what we do. We take ownership of our initiatives, decisions and outcomes. <img style="max-width: 100%;" src="https://emoji.slack-edge.com/T8GS4RNNM/relentlessly-improve/b5e1910b7c09b966.gif" alt=":relentlessly-improve:" width="30"> Relentlessly improve We demand more from ourselves and are always evolving. Continuous, obsessive improvement is the only way we will transform the world of conversational AI. <img style="max-width: 100%;" src="https://emoji.slack-edge.com/T8GS4RNNM/bias-for-action/0a5bd6888d3f2db1.gif" alt=":bias-for-action:" width="30"> Bias for action Our world moves quickly and so do we. We take calculated risks and we deliver impact fast. <img style="max-width: 100%;" src="https://emoji.slack-edge.com/T8GS4RNNM/disagree-and-commit/0cee7f9f02baac38.gif" alt=":disagree-and-commit:" width="30"> Disagree and commit We are all working toward the same goal. If we donʼt agree with something, we work hard to understand it and when a decision is made, we accept it and give it our all. <img style="max-width: 100%;" src="https://emoji.slack-edge.com/T8GS4RNNM/build-for-people/9c2fba2ffb2331c8.gif" alt=":build-for-people:" width="30"> Build for people We want the world to enjoy the experiences they have with us. We are building for a future that prefers automation. <hr> PolyAI is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment decisions at PolyAI will be based on the business needs without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, neurodiversity status or disability status. <hr> Kindly find the Privacy Notice for our recruitment process by following the link <a href="https://polyai.notion.site/Recruitment-Privacy-Notice-1b5097db17f7802ead64dd6daf159ded">here</a>. This document provides important information regarding how we handle your personal data throughout the recruitment journey.</div>

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