Engineering Manager, Voice AI Agents Platform at Vantaca · Redwood…

Overview

Engineering Managers help build an inspiring workplace where talented people are empowered to drive amazing customer experiences and business results. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, you will own the engineering vision and execution for HOAi's Voice AI Agents—the intelligent voice and chat agents that function like experienced community association managers, handling complex multi-step processes autonomously across phone, email, and messaging channels.

You will combine hands-on technical leadership with people management to build and ship production-grade conversational AI that delights customers and transforms how the property management industry operates. This means writing code and reviewing architectures alongside your team while also coaching engineers, running rituals, and shaping career paths. You will leverage your strong engineering fundamentals in distributed systems and real-time infrastructure—paired with a sharp product instinct—to solve critical business problems, set direction for your team, and serve as a key collaborator on business strategy within the product and development organization.

You will influence best engineering practices through hands-on leadership and help scale our next phase of rapid growth. Specific areas for impact include building and scaling the Voice AI engineering team, architecting reliable agent orchestration and voice pipelines, and providing technical and strategic leadership to evolve our AI agents from reactive assistants into proactive, reasoning-driven autonomous workers.

Vision for Role

We are looking for a dynamic leader and technologist with deep distributed systems expertise and a passion for building real-time products who pushes boundaries and thinks beyond expectations to inspire a talented team to do the same. This position involves managing a team of 4–8 engineers while remaining deeply hands-on—contributing to design, code, and architecture decisions daily.

This role is a unique chance to build something from the ground up—standing up a next-generation conversational AI agent platform today and shaping its evolution into a fully autonomous AI workforce that transforms how an entire industry operates. You'll need to understand real-time infrastructure (streaming pipelines, telephony, latency optimization), distributed systems at scale, and how these capabilities intersect with HOAi's broader AI platform. Prior AI/LLM experience is a plus but not required—what matters is the ability to learn fast and apply strong engineering fundamentals to a rapidly evolving domain. Working closely with product management and the leadership team, you will be a critical component to accelerating the innovation HOAi is bringing to customers with taste and speed.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Hands-On Contribution

• Lead the architecture and development of HOAi's Voice AI agent platform, spanning voice, chat, and multi-channel experiences.
• Contribute directly to system design, code reviews, and implementation—especially in areas involving LLM orchestration, agent runtime, tool calling, and real-time streaming pipelines.
• Own the technical direction for agent reliability, including session lifecycle management, conversation state, real-time orchestration, and automated degradation strategies.
• Drive the design and operation of STT/TTS integration, latency budgets, backpressure handling, and end-to-end observability across streaming and async workflows.
• Provide constructive feedback during code reviews, architecture discussions, and technical documents to support informed decision making.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging AI capabilities (new models, frameworks, evaluation harnesses) to keep HOAi at the frontier of conversational AI.

Product-Minded Delivery

• Lead high-impact initiatives that chart the course for our Voice AI platform, from core agent capabilities to new autonomous workflows.
• Through collaboration, influence a joint roadmap including prioritization and resource allocation by managing priorities and decisions based on factors such as technical capabilities, customer/partner/market requests, build-vs-buy-vs-partner, and competitive landscape.
• Drive strategic technical initiatives based on customer feedback and needs of the business to ensure the continued scalability, reliability, and quality of HOAi's AI agents.
• Build strong relationships between the technology team and external stakeholders and customers to deliver market-driven AI experiences.
• Drive quality initiatives by partnering with the Customer Experience team to understand support challenges and drive product improvements that reduce support load and improve agent accuracy.
• Collaborate with product and design teams to prepare and plan future initiatives, translating customer needs into agent capabilities.

People & Culture Leadership

• Focus on talent, process, accountability, and scalability that fuels product velocity and innovation.
• Conduct one-on-one meetings with direct reports to support their career growth and development.
• Mentor and guide software engineering professionals, helping them navigate career progression and professional development—particularly in the fast-evolving AI/ML space.
• Set objectives for continuous improvement for both products and people, driving the upward trajectory of talent within the team to add value to the business.
• Shape and nurture a culture of execution, velocity, innovation, excellence, ingenuity, and ownership as HOAi continues to scale.
• Facilitate stand-ups and retrospectives, documenting feedback and implementing improvements.
• Lead technical refinement sessions to ensure clarity and alignment on project goals and work with engineers to break down projects into manageable, deliverable tasks.
• Drive or contribute to significant process and workflow improvements within the team and the broader development organization.

Qualifications

• B.S. / M.S. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering with a track record of building and operating complex, production-grade systems
• 3+ years leading software engineering teams
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including queues/workers, caching, event-driven architectures, and operational best practices
• Active daily use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar)
• Hands-on experience building or operating real-time, low-latency systems (streaming, WebSockets, event-driven architectures)
• Excellent data modeling and API design skills (versioning, contracts, idempotency)
• Experience with reliability engineering practices: SLIs/SLOs, incident response, end-to-end tracing, and automated degradation strategies
• Proven experience working in a rapidly evolving growth environment, working on multiple products concurrently
• Strong leadership skills, capable of providing real-time coaching, creating actionable development plans, and promoting a culture that keeps people motivated and happy
• Ability to own and manage multiple concurrent projects, including presenting and negotiating with stakeholders on the interdependencies and possibilities of what can realistically be delivered
• Excellent stakeholder management, prioritization skills, and agile delivery through chaos and fast-paced environments
• Experience working with product managers to ensure planning and prioritization of key projects, inspiring the engineering team to achieve challenging and high-performance goals and timelines

Nice to Have

• Experience building or operating LLM-powered applications in production, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool calling, or agent orchestration frameworks
• Experience with voice/real-time infrastructure: WebRTC/RTC providers, telephony, SIP concepts, STT/TTS pipelines, jitter/packet loss mitigation
• Familiarity with AI/agent SDKs and frameworks: LiveKit, Twilio/telephony stacks, Vercel AI SDK, LangChain/LangGraph, Anthropic Agents SDK
• Experience with observability for real-time AI systems (OpenTelemetry traces spanning streaming + async workflows)
• Experience designing evaluation and monitoring frameworks for LLM-based agents (accuracy, latency, hallucination detection, conversation quality scoring)
• Background in the property management, proptech, or community association management industry

CORE VALUES

• Always Growing: Likes change and enjoys finding new ways to improve their knowledge and the product. Always ready to learn quickly, helping themselves and the team grow.
• Win as a Team: Builds trust and works together by making sure everyone communicates well. Actively involved in daily work, working closely with the team, listening to their ideas, and celebrating successes together.
• Accountability Starts with Me: Notices problems and takes personal action to solve them.
• Unwavering Commitment to Customer Experience: Regularly talks to customers, taking personal responsibility to understand what they need, address concerns, and make their experience better with improved Vantaca processes.
• Innovate Boldly: We challenge the status quo and push boundaries to create meaningful change. We act with urgency and purpose, knowing that innovation drives our success.

THE HOAI WAY

• Shoot for Impossible and Make it Happen: Sets audacious goals that others might see as unreachable and breaks them into actionable steps. Relentlessly perseveres through obstacles with resourcefulness and determination, turning ambitious vision into tangible results.
• Radical Candor Leads to Humble Excellence: Gives and receives direct, honest feedback with genuine care for others' growth. Stays open-minded on the path to continuous improvement, recognizing that the best outcome comes from carrying no ego.
• Hire and Develop the Best Talent: Actively seeks exceptional people who raise the bar and invests deeply in their growth. Creates opportunities for team members to stretch their capabilities, providing coaching and support that helps them reach their full potential.

WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN OUR TEAM

• Our eNPS is +68! (Google it, that is great).
• Benefits: Medical, Dental, and Vision kick in day one.
• Unlimited PTO (with a requirement for employees to take a minimum of one continuous week per year).
• 401K with Company Match.
• Remote Flexible - come to the office when needed.
• Great parental leave benefits.
• Named on Inc 5000 list of America's Fastest Growing Private Companies.
• Named on Inc 5000 Vet 100 Private Companies list multiple years in a row.
• Winner of Coastal Entrepreneur Award, Technology Category.
• Active employee-led Culture Committee.
• Ongoing industry and professional development trainings available to all employees.
• Multiple leaders on the executive committee recognized as 40 under 40 recipients for contributions to business and community.
• We're playing offense to win! Our product market fit and our world-class employees make us the leader in our space. We're building something cool and people like it here.

We receive many resumes for our open positions and each one is reviewed by a human being on our recruiting team. We will compare your background with the qualifications and requirements for the position. If you are selected for an interview you will receive an e-mail from someone on our recruiting team with an @vantaca.com email address. It may take some time for us to review all of the applications so give us some time to respond. We appreciate your interest in this role.