Engineering Manager

Chennai, Tamil Nadu (Hybrid)

Nextiva

Nextiva unites every conversation along the entire customer journey. One business communication platform for voice video, chat, social media, and email.

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Redefine the future of customer experiences. One conversation at a time.

We’re changing the game with a first-of-its-kind, conversation-centric platform that unifies team collaboration and customer experience in one place. Powered by AI, built by amazing humans.

Our culture is forward-thinking, customer-obsessed and built on an unwavering belief that connection fuels business and life; connections to our customers with our signature Amazing Service®, our products and services, and most importantly, each other. Since 2008, 100,000+ companies and 1M+ users rely on Nextiva for customer and team communication.

If you’re ready to collaborate and create with amazing people, let your personality shine and be on the frontlines of helping businesses deliver amazing experiences, you’re in the right place. 

Build Amazing - Deliver Amazing - Live Amazing - Be Amazing

 

Nextiva is seeking a hands on, experienced, and visionary Engineering Manager to lead our AI Agents team within the Data & Intelligence Platform group. You will be responsible for leading a team that develops intelligent, multimodal AI agents (voice and chatbots) as part of Nextiva’s next-generation customer experience platform. You will apply expertise in machine learning and software engineering to build AI-driven features that transform how businesses engage with customers. This position offers the opportunity to work at the forefront of generative AI and multimodal interactions, creating scalable AI solutions that blend automation with the human touch to deliver exceptional customer experiences.  

Success in this role will be measured by your ability to deliver AI features that measurably improve customer experiences (e.g., higher self-service resolution rates, faster response times, improved user satisfaction) while maintaining high software quality and ethical AI standards. You will help Nextiva achieve a balanced integration of AI and human interaction, directly contributing to our CX-first vision.  

Key Responsibilities 

  • Team Leadership & Development: Lead, mentor, and grow a team of AI Software Engineers. Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning. Provide technical guidance and career development support.  
  • Technical Oversight: Oversee the design, development, and deployment of AI agents for Nextiva’s products that understand and respond to customers in multiple formats (e.g., spoken voice, written text). Ensure delivery of high-quality, scalable, and reliable features. Guide the integration of NLP, speech recognition, and large language models into production systems. 
  • AI Model Integration: Integrate large language models and other AI/ML components into the Agentic AI Platform to enable capabilities such as question answering, task automation, sentiment analysis, and recommendations. Ensure that AI models and solutions perform effectively in real-world environments and at scale.  
  • Multimodal Interaction Systems: Build and integrate components for multimodal interactions, including speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and dialog management systems.   
  • Performance Optimization: Optimize AI algorithms and agent frameworks for performance, scalability, and reliability. Use data-driven methods to tune model accuracy and response times.   
  • Quality, Ethics & Compliance: Implement robust testing (unit, integration, end-to-end) for AI features to ensure reliability and correctness. Incorporate ethical AI practices, ensuring AI agent behavior is unbiased and compliant with privacy and security regulations.   
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner and collaborate across the product organization to define the roadmap for AI agent capabilities. Translate business goals into technical strategies and execution plans.  
  • Innovation & Thought Leadership: Stay current with advancements in AI, machine learning, and multimodal interaction systems. Drive innovation by evaluating and adopting emerging technologies. 

Qualifications 

  • Education & Experience: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or a related field (required). A Master’s degree in AI, Machine Learning, or a related discipline is strongly preferred. Equivalent practical experience in AI/ML development will also be considered.  
  • Experience: 8+ years of software development experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership or management role. Proven track record in AI/ML product development. Proven experience developing production-grade software (e.g., backend services, APIs, data pipelines) in a collaborative team environment.  
  • AI/ML Expertise: Strong understanding of AI and machine learning fundamentals with hands-on experience in natural language processing (NLP) and/or deep learning. Familiarity with the latest AI advancements (e.g., transformer-based models, conversational AI frameworks) and a history of applying AI models to solve real-world problems.  
  • Technical Skills: Proficiency in programming languages commonly used for AI development, such as Python (with ML libraries like TensorFlow or PyTorch) and/or a general-purpose language like Java or C# for scalable systems. Experience with machine learning frameworks and libraries for NLP, speech, or computer vision (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers, OpenAI APIs, spaCy, Kaldi, AWS/GCP/Azure AI services) is expected.  
  • Multimodal Interaction Knowledge: Experience with speech and language technologies – for example, integrating speech-to-text (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) engines, or building chatbots and voice bots for conversational interfaces.   
  • Cloud & Scalability: Familiarity with cloud platforms and deploying AI/ML models at scale (AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure). Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) for AI services.   
  • Leadership Skills: Demonstrated ability to lead high-performing engineering teams. Strong project management, communication, and stakeholder engagement skills.

Nextiva DNA (Core Competencies)

Nextiva’s most successful team members share common traits and behaviors:

  • Drives Results: Action-oriented with a passion for solving problems. They bring clarity and simplicity to ambiguous situations, challenge the status quo, and ask what can be done differently. They lead and drive change, celebrating success to build more success.
  • Critical Thinker: Understands the "why" and identifies key drivers, learning from the past. They are fact-based and data-driven, forward-thinking, and see problems a few steps ahead. They provide options, recommendations, and actions, understanding risks and dependencies.
  • Right Attitude: They are team-oriented, collaborative, competitive, and hate losing. They are resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, zoom in and out, and get in the trenches to help solve important problems. They cultivate a culture of service, learning, support, and respect, caring for customers and teams.

Total Rewards

Our Total Rewards offerings are designed to allow our employees to take care of themselves and their families so they can be their best, in and out of the office.

Our compensation packages are tailored to each role and candidate's qualifications. We consider a wide range of factors, including skills, experience, training, and certifications, when determining compensation. We aim to offer competitive salaries or wages that reflect the value you bring to our team. Depending on the position, compensation may include base salary and/or hourly wages, incentives, or bonuses.

  • Medical 🩺 - Medical insurance coverage is available for employees, their spouse, and up to two dependent children with a limit of 500,000 INR, as well as their parents or in-laws for up to 300,000 INR. This comprehensive coverage ensures that essential healthcare needs are met for the entire family unit, providing peace of mind and security in times of medical necessity.
  • Group Term & Group Personal Accident Insurance 💼 - Provides insurance coverage against the risk of death / injury during the policy period sustained due to an accident caused by violent, visible & external means.
    • Coverage Type - Employee Only
    • Sum Insured - 3 times of annual CTC with minimum cap of INR 10,00,000
    • Free Cover Limit - 1.5 Crore
  • Work-Life Balance ⚖️ - 15 days of Privilege leaves per calendar year, 6 days of Paid Sick leave per calendar year, 6 days of Casual leave per calendar year. Paid 26 weeks of Maternity leaves, 1 week of Paternity leave, a day off on your Birthday, and paid holidays
  • Financial Security💰 - Provident Fund & Gratuity
  • Wellness 🤸‍ - Employee Assistance Program and comprehensive wellness initiatives
  • Growth 🌱 - Access to ongoing learning and development opportunities and career advancement

At Nextiva, we're committed to supporting our employees' health, well-being, and professional growth. Join us and build a rewarding career! 

Established in 2008 and headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, Nextiva secured $200M from Goldman Sachs in late 2021, valuing the company at $2.7B.To check out what’s going on at Nextiva, check us out on Instagram, Instagram (MX), YouTube, LinkedIn, and the Nextiva blog

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* Salary range is an estimate based on our AI, ML, Data Science Salary Index 💰

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Tags: APIs Architecture ASR AWS Azure Chatbots Computer Science Computer Vision Conversational AI CX Data pipelines Deep Learning Docker Engineering GCP Generative AI Google Cloud Java Kubernetes LLMs Machine Learning Microservices ML models NLP OpenAI Pipelines Privacy Python PyTorch Security spaCy TensorFlow Testing Transformers

Perks/benefits: Career development Competitive pay Equity / stock options Health care Medical leave Parental leave Salary bonus Startup environment Wellness

Region: Asia/Pacific
Country: India

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