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Director of Customer Engineering, Agent Builder

Decagon

Decagon

Customer Service
San Francisco, CA, USA
USD 250k-320k / year + Equity
Posted on Jan 22, 2026

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

APM & Post Sales Operations

Compensation

  • Base Salary $250K – $320K • Offers Equity

About Decagon

Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experience. Our AI agents provide intelligent, human-like responses across chat, email, and voice, resolving millions of customer inquiries across every language and at any time.

Since coming out of stealth, Decagon has experienced rapid growth. We partner with industry leaders like Hertz, Eventbrite, Duolingo, Oura, Bilt, Curology, and Samsara to redefine customer experience at scale. We've raised over $200M from Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, a16z, BOND Capital, A*, Elad Gil, and notable angels such as the founders of Box, Airtable, Rippling, Okta, Lattice, and Klaviyo.

We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values—customers are everything, relentless momentum, winner’s mindset, and stronger together—shape how we work and grow as a team.

About the Team

Over the past few years, development of LLMs has evolved at a rapid pace. It’s not enough for our customers to just “set it and forget it” when it comes to AI software. Truly successful AI Agents require hands-on execution, rigorous iteration, and deep technical delivery to reach enterprise-grade performance.

We’re creating an Agent Builder Org: a specialized technical delivery team responsible for end-to-end execution of AI agent builds. Agent Builders own the hands-on work required to deliver best-in-class agents—writing and configuring key components, validating integrations, and ensuring agents perform reliably at scale. This team brings greater specialization and focus to build quality. Agent Builders are technical and customer-facing: interfacing with senior technical stakeholders while going deep on agent configuration and build execution.

About the Role

As Director of Field Engineering, you will lead Decagon’s technical delivery for strategic enterprise customers—owning outcomes across multiple deployments and building the team, playbooks, and operating system required to scale. This is a senior, customer-facing leadership role where you’ll partner with customer executives and technical leaders to define success, translate requirements into delivery plans, and drive launches that measurably impact customer outcomes.

You’ll work closely with Agent PMs, Agent Success, Engineering, and GTM leadership to create tight feedback loops: driving delivery, surfacing product gaps, and influencing the evolution of Decagon’s agent-building platform based on real enterprise needs. This role is ideal for a leader who thrives in fast-moving environments, enjoys shipping customer-facing technical work, and can balance hands-on problem solving with structured execution at scale.

In this role, you will

  • Lead and scale a high-performing delivery org

    • Own end-to-end execution of AI agent deployments for enterprise customers across a portfolio, from scoping through launch and iteration.

    • Build, lead, and develop a team of Agent Builders; hire, coach, and set a high bar for quality, velocity, and customer outcomes.

    • Establish delivery operating rhythms (planning, reviews, retros), capacity planning, and forecasting to ensure predictable execution.

  • Drive executive-level customer engagements

    • Interface with senior technical stakeholders and executives to define success criteria, align on constraints (security/compliance), and drive delivery against timelines.

    • Lead complex escalations and unblock cross-functional teams when quality, timelines, or customer outcomes are at risk.

    • Translate customer needs into crisp internal documentation and execution plans across Product/Engineering/GTM.

  • Create repeatable playbooks and scale mechanisms

    • Define and standardize delivery methodologies and artifacts (e.g., AOP quality bar, launch readiness checklists, iteration loops).

    • Establish best practices for evaluation and guardrails to ensure safe, compliant, and predictable agent performance in real-world scenarios.

    • Improve tooling and processes to reduce time-to-launch and increase reliability across deployments.

  • Influence the platform roadmap through deployment insights

    • Identify recurring product/platform gaps and drive prioritization with Engineering and Product leadership.

    • Partner with internal teams to turn real customer needs into platform improvements that compound across deployments.

Your background looks something like this

  • 10+ years of relevant experience in technical, customer-facing roles (e.g., forward-deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, implementation engineering, technical product/PM, or similar).

  • 5+ years of people management experience, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and building high-performing teams; ideally experience leading senior ICs and/or managers.

  • Strong technical foundation—comfortable working with APIs, integrations, and complex systems; able to go deep to diagnose issues and guide solution architecture.

  • Experience delivering production-grade customer solutions that require structured execution, testing/validation, and iteration.

  • Ability to communicate clearly with senior technical stakeholders, translate requirements into execution plans, and drive delivery.

  • Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where you build structure while maintaining momentum.

Even better

  • Experience deploying LLM-based products or AI agents in production (prompting, evaluation, guardrails, tooling, workflow design).

  • Experience with enterprise SaaS integrations (e.g., ticketing systems, CRM, data pipelines) and security/compliance considerations.

  • Strong product instincts—ability to define success metrics, write crisp requirements, and contribute customer insight back into product roadmap.

  • Experience scaling a delivery function from high-touch execution to repeatable playbooks and durable operating cadence.

Compensation

$250K – $320K + Offers Equity

Compensation Range: $250K - $320K