VP of Engineering (Must be based in London)

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.

As VP of Engineering, you’ll own the growth and performance of PolyAI’s engineering organisation, ensuring we can scale from tens of engineers to hundreds while maintaining world-class product velocity, technical quality, and reliability. You will bring experience from high-growth environments, where ARR and team sizes expanded rapidly, and apply those learnings to PolyAI’s journey as we scale from $10M+ to $100M+ ARR. You’ll oversee engineering teams focused on product development, scalability, and reliability, creating an environment where engineers thrive, innovate, and deliver at speed. You’ll balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery, guiding architectural choices while keeping a sharp eye on execution and outcomes. This is a leadership role, but one where curiosity, experimentation, and technical credibility matter. While you won’t need to be hands-on day to day, your ability to prototype, explore emerging technologies, and engage with modern architectures will inspire the team and help us stay at the cutting edge.

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead and grow PolyAI’s engineering organisation from tens to hundreds of engineers across multiple disciplines and geographies.
• Build and scale engineering management systems - performance management, hiring, onboarding, and development - to ensure teams are effective, motivated, and high-performing.
• Partner closely with Product leadership to align engineering execution with company strategy and goals.
• Guide architectural decisions with a focus on scalable, modern, and resilient design (cloud-native on AWS and Azure, microservices, and beyond).
• Drive an appropriate balance between delivery velocity and managing technical debt.
• Build and oversee engineering teams dedicated to product development, scalability, and reliability, ensuring collaboration across disciplines.
• Support the adoption of emerging technologies - from new languages and frameworks to agentic architecture, vibe coding, and other machine learning systems - evaluating pros and cons with a critical eye.
• Foster a culture of curiosity, iteration, and reinvention, encouraging the organisation to re-examine and evolve processes and technologies every 6 -12 months.
• Build strong team culture across distributed settings (hybrid in-person and remote), spanning multiple nationalities and working styles.

We’d love to hear from you if you have:

• Experience scaling engineering organisations from ~20 to 200+ engineers, including managing managers and directors.
• A track record of leading in high-growth SaaS environments (2 - 3x ARR growth year on year, scaling from ~$10M to $100M+).
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS and Azure), modern architecture design, and distributed systems at scale.
• Familiarity with our core languages and technologies (Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Go); experience evaluating and introducing new stacks a plus.
• Understanding of machine learning systems and how to design engineering infrastructure around them.
• The ability to navigate tradeoffs between speed and quality, balancing technical debt against delivery velocity.
• Experience building and running engineering organisations in hybrid settings (part in-person, part remote), with multi-national teams and cultures.
• Strong leadership presence: personable, clear communicator, and skilled at building trust across functions and levels.

Bonus points if you:

• Have experience experimenting with or deploying agentic architectures, and can speak to their tradeoffs.
• Enjoy prototyping or hacking on side projects to demonstrate ideas or inspire the team.
• Have worked closely with voice AI, conversational AI, or ML-heavy products.

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.

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.

• 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 don’t 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.

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