Senior Engineering Manager, AI Agents

The Company

Join us in bringing joy to customer experience.  Five9 is a leading provider of AI-enabled cloud contact center software. We are a publicly traded US company, generating over a billion US dollars a year in revenues. In our last earnings call, we reported that AI is now 11% of our enterprise subscription revenues, making us one of the largest vendors of enterprise AI for customer experience.

If AI is the hot technology right now, and AI Agents are the hottest area of that technology, and Customer Experience (CX) is the most important application of AI Agents, Five9 is sitting at the pinnacle of the most innovative area of technology we’ve seen in twenty years.

The Mission

Our vision is nothing less than to reimagine the experience of connection between end users and the brands which serve them. We are doing so by reimagining the contact center software stack using AI Agents. Our AI agents will offer self-service which delights and accomplishes tasks at super-human speeds, while also blending in live human agents for the many cases when a human touch is needed. Our AI agents will assist the live agents too, and help supervisors and managers get the most out of their mix of human and AI labor. Our AI Agents will analyze troves of conversations, extracting insights and data that provide actionable guidance on how brands can reduce costs while improving CX. We believe in the power of AI and humans combined.

The Culture

Living our values everyday results in our team-first culture and enables us to innovate, grow, and thrive while enjoying the journey together. We celebrate diversity and foster an inclusive environment, empowering our employees to be their authentic self. 

The team 

This role sits within our AI Product Engineering team. This team is the fastest growing organization with Five9. It is responsible for the software development, operations ultimately success for our suite of AI products. These include our self-service solutions (voice bots, chat bots, and AI Agents), our agent assistance applications, and our analytics tools. The team is geographically dispersed around the world, with centers of excellence in US (distributed, though many in the San Francisco east bay area), Melbourne Australia, Porto, Portugal, and Chennai and Bengaluru in India.

The team doesn’t build frontier models. Rather, it integrates such models – using the latest and greatest from vendors like OpenAI and Google - to provide end-to-end solutions focused on customer experience.

Job Description

The Senior Engineering Manager, AI Agents will lead the development and delivery of Five9’s AI Agent software platform, which provides customers with fully autonomous self-service agents for customer support, sales, and services use cases in the contact center. This is one of the hottest areas of application for AI Agent technology!

This role is responsible for building and managing a high-performing engineering team that develops scalable, reliable, and production-grade AI-powered systems used in real-time customer conversations.

You will be responsible for hiring and developing engineers, improving engineering processes, and enabling strong execution across the software development lifecycle. While this is a management role rather than an individual contributor position, the ideal candidate will bring strong technical credibility with engineers and guide architecture discussions, technical decisions, and engineering best practices.

You will collaborate closely with Product, SRE, Support, and other engineering teams to deliver an enterprise-grade platform while fostering a culture of operational excellence, ownership, and customer empathy.

You will make use of AI coding assistants, specifically Claude Code, to produce code as well as work with the team using these tools.

Required Experience:

• 1+ years of Experience in software development for GenAI platforms for Customer Support/Customer Experience is REQUIRED

• 5+ years of software development experience, ideally in Java

• 5+ years of experience in enterprise SaaS software development

• 10+ years of software development experience

• Bachelors or advanced degree in computer science, computer engineering or similar
  
  
• Experience using Claude Code for software development

Technical Skills

Core Software Engineering

• Expert-level proficiency in Java and JVM-based frameworks. Nice to Have: Spring Boot,

• Strong understanding of object-oriented design, design patterns, clean code, refactoring, and code quality best practices.

• Deep experience designing and building distributed, event-driven systems with high reliability and low latency.

• Expertise in API design (REST/gRPC), service contracts, and backward-compatible evolution.

AI Agent / GenAI Platform Engineering

• 1+ years

• Strong familiarity with LLMs, prompt orchestration, function calling, and multi-agent reasoning workflows.

• Experience building AI-enabled microservices, including integrating LLM providers, embeddings, vector databases, RAG pipelines, and structured output validation.

• Solid understanding of model latency, throughput, caching strategies, eval frameworks, and ML-specific observability.

• Experience using one or more frontier models from OpenAI, Google, or open source

Cloud & Infrastructure (GCP Preferred)

• 5+ years experience in building enterprise SaaS software

• Expertise with public cloud software development platforms, AWS, GCP or Azure. Preference for GCP experience (Five9 is on GCP)

• Strong familiarity with networking fundamentals: HTTP/2/3, gRPC, load balancing, API gateways, service meshes.

AI Coding Assistance (Claude Code)

• Experience creating production code using coding assistants, preferably Claude Code

Operational Excellence

• Strong command of SRE principles: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incident response, root cause analysis.

• On-call experience, including incident handling, troubleshooting, and service remediation

• Experience designing systems for observability: tracing, logging, metrics, profiling

• Knowledge of performance optimization—CPU, memory, threading, concurrency, GC tuning.

• Hands-on experience running 24×7 global enterprise SaaS systems in production.

Security & Compliance Awareness

• Familiarity with authentication/authorization technologies (OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS).

• Understanding of secure coding practices, data protection, and enterprise SaaS compliance needs (SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA).

Architectural & Design Skills

• Ability to drive end-to-end architecture for complex platforms, from requirements → design → implementation → deployment.

• Skilled at creating architecture docs, ADRs, technical deep-dives, and communicating trade-offs clearly.

• Strong understanding of eventing, CQRS, streaming, pub/sub, state machines, and distributed consensus patterns.

• Experience in using AI to accelerate software development, using tools like Claude Code or Microsoft CoPilot

Cross-Functional & Leadership Skills

• Ability to mentor and elevate teams—code reviews, design guidance, pairing, coaching junior engineers.

• Strong communication skills; capable of explaining technical decisions to:

• Engineering leadership

• Product & UX

• Support, SRE, QA, and Solutions Engineering

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across orgs to deliver complete, integrated product experiences.

Strategic & Execution Skills

• Ability to set technical direction for the platform and influence roadmaps.

• Ownership mentality across the entire SDLC—design → implementation → CI/CD → monitoring → production operations.

• Exceptional judgment in balancing innovation vs reliability, short-term velocity vs long-term maintainability.

• Ability to decompose large initiatives into deliverable components, driving execution with high accountability.

This role is hybrid and requires 3 days a week in office.