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 leading brands, are expanding how they use our platform, driving automation of critical customer service operations and integrating PolyAI into daily workflows.

Role

As VP of Engineering, you will own the growth and performance of PolyAI's engineering organization, ensuring we can scale from tens to hundreds of engineers while maintaining world-class product velocity, technical quality, and reliability. You will bring experience from high-growth environments and apply those learnings to PolyAI as we scale from $10M+ to $100M+ ARR.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead and grow PolyAI's engineering organization 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 architectures, 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 organization 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.

Qualifications

• Experience scaling engineering organizations 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 core languages and technologies (Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Go); experience evaluating and introducing new stacks is a plus.
• Understanding of machine learning systems and how to design engineering infrastructure around them.
• Ability to navigate tradeoffs between speed and quality, balancing technical debt against delivery velocity.
• Experience building and running engineering organizations 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

• 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.
• Experience working closely with voice AI, conversational AI, or ML-heavy products.

Benefits and values

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.

• 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 – confidential, judgment-free support for work, health, or life challenges
• Enhanced parental leave
• Bike2Work scheme
• Annual learning and development allowance
• One-off WFH allowance at joining (e.g., headphones, desk chair)
• Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes
• Menopause care programme with Maven
• Private healthcare and dental cover, gym discounts, mental health programs

At PolyAI, we take pride in our values and are committed to an inclusive, equal-opportunity workplace. All employment decisions are based on business needs without regard to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, neurodiversity status, or disability status.

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