Agent Design Manager

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 are looking for an Agent Design Manager to lead a multidisciplinary team of Agent Designers and Agent Design Engineers. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who sits comfortably at the intersection of conversational UX design and technical implementation - 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 have spent your career frustrated by the artificial gap between design and engineering, this role was built for you.

What you’ll do:

• Lead and develop your team
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Agent Designers and Agent Design Engineers, raising the bar on both design craft and technical execution
• Set clear objectives, provide thoughtful feedback, and support the professional development of every person on the team
• Foster a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and continuous improvement, with user-centred thinking at its core
• Own the quality of conversational experiences
• Act as the design authority for conversational UX across all agents - setting standards for tone, clarity, naturalness, and consistency
• Stay hands-on with agent design and implementation, particularly on complex or high-impact projects
• Ensure every experience we ship feels intuitive and human, not scripted and robotic
• Drive the discipline forward
• Guide the team through the full lifecycle: from user journey mapping and conversation design through to implementation - including prompting, tool integration, and context engineering - testing, and iteration
• Build and evolve processes that balance creative exploration with reliable delivery
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Project Management to advocate for design quality throughout the development lifecycle
• 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

What we’re looking for:

Required

• 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
• 3+ years of people management experience, with a track record of developing designers and/or engineers into stronger practitioners
• 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
• Proficiency in Python sufficient to read, review, and meaningfully engage with what your team ships - engineering background candidates should be comfortable going deeper
• Actively engaged with agentic AI workflows - you may not have shipped production multi-agent systems, but you are experimenting hands-on, forming opinions, and capable of leading your team into new patterns as the field evolves
• Meticulous attention to detail around language, consistency, tone, and interaction quality
• Clear, inclusive communication - able to translate between design and engineering contexts fluently

Preferred:

• Experience designing or deploying conversational AI assistants (voice or chat) using any platform or tooling
• Familiarity with LLMs in practice: prompt engineering, tool use, retrieval, context management
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks or orchestration patterns - multi-step reasoning, structured workflows, tool-calling agents
• Experience with agile delivery practices - sprint planning, retrospectives, capacity management
• Experience managing external client relationships and stakeholder expectations

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’re hiring for, so we encourage you to review the job description carefully.

• Participation in the company’s employee share options plan
• 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
• 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
• 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, Ownership, Relentlessly improve, Bias for action, Disagree and commit, Build for people.

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.