Director of Engineering – Agentic Engineering

Join us in bringing joy to customer experience. Five9 is a leading provider of cloud contact center software, bringing the power of cloud innovation to customers worldwide.

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 selves.

Five9 has led the cloud revolution in contact centers, helping organisations transition from legacy premise-based solutions to the cloud. The cloud contact center market has become the hot space for innovation in real-time communications, and is the tip of the spear for the application of Artificial Intelligence, especially Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM). Five9 has established itself as a leader in this market and has recently launched its AI Agents, providing the next-generation of self-service and customer experience.

Five9 is establishing an Agentic Engineering team in Bangalore, India. This team will sit on the bleeding edge of AI technology, and be responsible for the development of AI Agents on top of the Five9 platform. The team will own the entire lifecycle of AI Agent development, from requirements to development to testing to deployment to ongoing maintenance and improvement. Members of the team will utilize skills in prompt engineering, prompt design, agent and multi-agent architectures, function calling, and tool definition to build best-of-breed AI agents for real-world use cases. Prior experience in AI Agent development is highly desirable but not required.

Five9 is seeking a Director of Engineering, Agentic Engineering – to lead and build this team. This is a ground floor opportunity for a highly talented and ambitious engineering leader to step into the role of a lifetime – at the cutting edge of the hottest technology in the last three decades – at a scaled player in AI for customer experience.

*This position is based out of one of the offices of our affiliate Acqueon Technologies in India, and will adopt the hybrid work arrangements of that location. You will be a member of the Acqueon team with responsibilities supporting Five9 products, collaborating with global teammates based primarily in the United States.

• Hire, train, retain and grow a team of talented engineers to create a scaled agentic engineering organization for a $1B USD/year revenue company

• Lead a team responsible for the development and testing of AI Agents for B2B customer experience use cases in healthcare, financial services, retail and beyond, which will become part of the product and available to Five9 customers globally to use with their customers

• Maintain expertise – through ongoing review of academic papers and competitive analysis of vendors – in the latest-and-greatest algorithms, techniques, and architectures for AI Agent design, and apply those to build best-in-class AI Agents

• Interface with customers and customer facing teams to understand requirements and use cases for which the AI Agent needs to satisfy

• Partner with the engineering team building the AI Agent platform, providing feedback on improvements that improve agent performance and reduce time to implement

• 3+ years of experience in development of conversational AI applications for customer service space, such as for healthcare, financial services or retail organizations

• 5+ years experience in customer-facing technical roles, such as professional services, customer support, technical account management, solutions consulting, technical sales, and so on

• Experience with commercial products used for the development of customer support and customer experience (CX) applications, such as Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson, Kore.ai, Five9, Genesys, NICE, Amelia, Omelia, and so on

• Expertise in conversational AI technologies, including speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language processing, and large language models. Experience in creating such models is not required, only experience in using them

• Experience with AI Agent technologies, including prompt engineering, MCP, A2A, ReACT, LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGPT, Open Agents, Semantic Kernel, RAG, fine-tuning, and embeddings, is highly desired but not required

• Strong communication skills, including written and verbal communication in English

• 5+ years of experience as a line manager

• Experience in hiring and building teams from scratch, including the usage of contractors and labor providers in India

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience