Overview

PolyAI automates customer service through lifelike voice assistants that let customers lead a conversation. Our voice assistants enable businesses to deliver outstanding customer service that rivals human agents. Our customers — including many leading brands — are expanding how they use our platform, driving automation of critical customer service operations and integrating PolyAI into daily 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. You’ll create 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 don’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 geographiesBuild and scale engineering management systems — performance management, hiring, onboarding, and development — to ensure teams are effective, motivated, and high-performingPartner closely with Product leadership to align engineering execution with company strategy and goalsGuide 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 debtBuild and oversee engineering teams dedicated to product development, scalability, and reliability, ensuring collaboration across disciplinesSupport 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 eyeFoster a culture of curiosity, iteration, and reinvention, encouraging the organisation to re-examine and evolve processes and technologies every 6–12 monthsBuild a strong team culture across distributed settings (hybrid in-person and remote), spanning multiple nationalities and working stylesWe’d love to hear from you if you have

Experience scaling engineering organisations from -20 to 200+ engineers, including managing managers and directorsA 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 scaleUnderstanding of machine learning systems and how to design engineering infrastructure around themThe ability to navigate tradeoffs between speed and quality, balancing technical debt against delivery velocityExperience building and running engineering organisations in hybrid settings (part in-person, part remote), with multi-national teams and culturesStrong leadership presence: personable, clear communicator, and skilled at building trust across functions and levelsHave experience experimenting with or deploying agentic architectures, and can speak to their tradeoffsEnjoy prototyping or hacking on side projects to demonstrate ideas or inspire the teamHave worked closely with voice AI, conversational AI, or ML-heavy productsWe 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.We’re 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 business needs without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, neurodiversity status or disability status.This role requires someone able to come to our London, Paddington office several days a week. Is this something you are able to do?

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