Engineering Manager - AI

Why this role exists

Most AI products don't fail in the demo - they fail in production. Latency spikes, hallucinations under edge cases, voice agents that can't handle interruptions, eval pipelines that catch bugs after customers do. We're building JustCall's AI engineering function to make sure none of that happens on our watch.

We need an Engineering Manager, AI who can sit across the table from a product leader, an enterprise customer, or a junior engineer debugging a live voice agent - and walk out with a cleaner architecture, a faster system, and a team that ships production-grade AI with the confidence that comes from actually having built it before. Someone who stays close to the code, owns the infrastructure, and raises the engineering bar every quarter.

What you'll actually do

• Lead engineering across AI Voice Agents (AIVA), AI Coaching, Conversation Intelligence, AI Workflows, and future AI-native products - with full ownership of technical direction and delivery.

• Stay deeply hands-on with architecture, coding, debugging, latency optimisation, observability, and production reliability - this is a player-coach role, not a pure management seat.

• Build scalable voice AI systems across real-time orchestration, memory and context handling, eval pipelines, and workflow execution.

• Define AI quality frameworks - golden datasets, eval pipelines, regression detection, scoring systems, and operational metrics - that catch problems before customers do.

• Drive technical decisions across model selection, prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, infrastructure, and platform architecture.

• Hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing AI engineering organisation in India while maintaining a strong, execution-focused technical culture.

• Partner closely with Product and Design to deliver AI experiences that feel intuitive, reliable, and production-ready - not impressive in a sandbox and broken in the field.

• Shape JustCall's long-term AI roadmap across multilingual support, outbound AI agents, vertical workflows, and omnichannel automation.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years building distributed systems, AI/ML products, real-time systems, or voice infrastructure - with 3+ years leading engineering teams.

• Strong track record of shipping production-grade AI products used by real customers at scale - not just prototypes or internal tools.

• Experience building agentic systems with orchestration, tool calling, retries, fallbacks, memory and context management, and graceful degradation.

• Deep hands-on expertise with eval systems, automated testing, regression detection, and operational monitoring for LLM applications.

• Strong systems thinking around latency, reliability, observability, and production debugging in AI environments.

• Experience making architectural decisions around prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, memory systems, and model routing.

• A player-coach mindset - you lead teams while remaining highly technical and execution-oriented.

• Strong product intuition and engineering judgment - you balance experimentation, speed, and scalability without losing any of the three.

Edges that help

• Experience building or scaling production voice agents using platforms like Pipecat, Retell, Vapi, LiveKit, ElevenLabs, or similar infrastructure.

• Familiarity with the hard problems in voice AI - interruption handling, semantic turn detection, latency optimisation, accented speech recognition, multilingual conversations, and real-time orchestration.

• Experience hiring and scaling high-performing engineering teams in India.

How we work

• Outcomes over process. We measure engineering impact by production reliability, latency benchmarks, eval coverage, and the AI experiences we ship - not tickets closed.

• Deeply hands-on culture - leadership here means staying close to the hardest technical problems, not delegating your way out of them.

• Fast cycles, high ambiguity, and the expectation that you bring both architectural depth and shipping velocity to every initiative.

• Competitive pay tied to the systems you architect and the engineering culture you build.

The bigger picture

JustCall is SaaS Labs' flagship product - used by 6,000+ businesses across 70+ countries to run their customer conversations. We're backed by Peak XV and Base10 Partners, have crossed $40M ARR, and are building toward $100M with the team, the product, and the infrastructure to get there.

If this is the role you've been waiting to find - let's talk.

SaaS Labs takes pride in being an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better products, which is why we're committed to making hiring or any employment decision regardless of race, colour, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic.