Engineering Manager - Voice Agents

The Agentic Tribe is revolutionizing the chatbot and voice assistance landscape with Gen3, a cutting-edge AI Agent system that\’s pushing the boundaries of conversational AI. Gen3 is not your typical chatbot; it\’s a goal-oriented, dynamic, and truly conversational system capable of reasoning, planning, and adapting to user needs in real-time. By leveraging a multi-agent architecture and advanced language models, Gen3 delivers personalized and engaging user experiences, moving beyond scripted interactions to handle complex tasks and \”off-script\” inquiries with ease.
As the Engineering Manager for the Voice Agent Team, you\’ll lead a team of talented engineers and researchers to build the future of conversational AI. Your core mission is to develop and scale multiple voice agents, creating powerful tools that allow our clients to deploy seamless, voice-first experiences. You\’ll oversee the development of core technologies like speech recognition, STS-TTS, Realtime Voice models, etc while also guiding the creation of a powerful framework for agent development. A key part of your role will be ensuring our technology is highly scalable and performs with minimal latency, shaping the tools that empower clients to transform customer service and create new interactive experiences.

You will directly manage about 6-8 engineers from various skill sets (Frontend and Backend) and work closely with stakeholders across the department. The number of people and skill sets you interact with might be subject to change as we gear up the organization for future challenges.

What you will be doing:

• Lead a cross-functional team, guiding them towards achieving their full potential

• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration, driving your teams to innovate and continuously discover and evaluate new technologies

• Empower your team through coaching, mentorship, and skill development

• Foster a culture of micro feedback, mutual accountability, shared ownership, and a bottom up culture in close collaboration with the other Engineering Managers

• Enable engineers to push for best practices inside their discipline aiming at greater productivity, cleaner code and product quality

• Collaborate with fellow Engineering Managers and Chapter Leads to keep our engineering group focused and effective

• Facilitate communication between Engineers, Product Managers and stakeholders within the RnD department and across the business, fostering understanding and alignment

• Accountability for for the delivery and product quality in your team

What you bring to the role:

• Proven experience in building and scaling voice-based products, with a strong understanding of technologies such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech systems.

• Enthusiastic mentor with the ability to inspire teams, fostering professional development and empowering teams to reach their full potential

• Strong technical background and professional experience developing and maintaining complex architectures

• Proven track record of successfully managing and motivating engineering teams, driving them towards achieving ambitious goals

• Experience scaling teams and leading engineering teams through change

• Understanding the value of diverse perspectives and actively seeking input from others to achieve optimal outcomes, acknowledging that your own viewpoint may not always be the best

• You excel in facilitating discussions and communicating with various stakeholders, ensuring clarity and alignment across teams and departments

• Experience working in collaborative teams,leveraging practices like pair programming and code reviews to promote knowledge sharing and enhance team performance

• Strong expertise in iterative development and balancing risks

• Commitment to Quality and a deep understanding of how to achieve and maintain it within complex architectures and software designs

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Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration – while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.