Engineering Manager - Runtime Team

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.

We’re looking for a talented Engineering Manager to join our Runtime Engineering team. Our Runtime team own the global infrastructure that powers real-time voice interactions. In this role, you will focus on leading and developing a high-performing engineering team while staying close to the technical challenges at the core of our agentic process: streaming audio, transcribing speech, using LLMs and acting on their output, and synthesising natural voice. You will guide the team as they design and optimise systems across the media stack to deliver low-latency, secure, and reliable conversations. Your leadership will directly shape the user experience of every call, driving down response times, improving comprehension, and ensuring we meet strict SLAs for performance and security.

Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and mentor a cross-functional team of 3 to 5 engineers, focusing on people management, career growth, and building a strong team culture.
• Run team operations end to end, including sprint planning, review cycles, and performance management, ensuring clear goals, predictable delivery, and accountability.
• Drive hiring efforts to grow the team, partnering with Talent and contributing to a high-quality interview process.
• Partner closely with Product to translate business goals into an actionable roadmap and measurable outcomes for internal tooling, observability, and scalability.
• Oversee the software architecture of our multitenant conversational AI platform, ensuring robustness, scalability, and reliability, particularly in externally facing developer APIs.
• Champion and enforce strong engineering standards and best practices across the team.
• Support technical decision-making, guiding engineers through design choices, trade-offs, and architectural challenges while maintaining a strong understanding of the systems in your domain.

Requirements

• 3 or more years of experience working in a SaaS company, with at least 5 years of professional experience as a Software Engineer and a strong technical foundation.
• Proven experience managing a team or having direct reports, including sprint leadership, performance reviews, technical mentorship, project planning, and delivery.
• Demonstrated ability to build and execute a roadmap for an engineering team, collaborating closely with cross-functional partners.
• Experience coaching engineers through technical challenges and architectural decisions.
• Significant expertise in Python is a must. Experience with GoLang is preferable but not essential. Experience with React is a plus.
• Experience with internal tooling, observability, and scaling distributed systems.
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

We offer competitive compensation based on experience, expertise, and the level of responsibility. This role also includes equity, giving you the opportunity to share in the long-term success of the business. The listed expectations reflect what we are hiring for, so we encourage you to review the job description carefully.

Benefits

💰 Participation in the company’s employee share options plan

🏝 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays

🏡 Flexible working from home policy

🌎 Work from outside of the UK for up to 6 months each year

🫂TELUS Health EAP 24/7 - offers you and your chosen family confidential, judgment-free support for any work, health, or life challenge

🧡 Enhanced parental leave

🚲 Bike2Work scheme

📚 Annual learning and development allowance

🏡 We’re all about making WFH work for you - that’s why we offer 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!

👨‍👩‍👧 Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes

🌸 Menopause care programme with Maven

🏥 Private healthcare and dental cover, discounts on gym members and relaxation apps, and access to a range of mental health programs

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

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.

Ownership

We care deeply about what we do. We take ownership of our initiatives, decisions and outcomes.

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.

Bias for action

Our world moves quickly and so do we. We take calculated risks and we deliver impact fast.

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.

Build for people

We want the world to enjoy the experiences they have with us. We are building for a future that prefers automation.

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.

Kindly find the Privacy Notice for our recruitment process by following the link here . This document provides important information regarding how we handle your personal data throughout the recruitment journey.