See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as our next Director, Engineering - Twilio A.I.

Who we are & why we’re hiring

Twilio powers real-time business communications and data solutions that help companies and developers worldwide build better applications and customer experiences.

Although we're headquartered in San Francisco, we're on a journey to becoming a globally antiracist company that supports diversity, equity & inclusion wherever we do business. We employ thousands of Twilions worldwide, and we're looking for more builders, creators, and visionaries to help fuel our growth momentum.

About the job

The Twilio A.I. team is seeking an inspiring Engineering Leader that can lead global engineering teams in developing, launching, and operating products at scale. We need someone to partner with product management on roadmap and long term strategy, evangelizing the Twilio AI capabilities through the rest of Twilio, and most importantly driving execution of a high-power engineering team of 40+ engineers (and growing!). The person in this role will be critical in delivering the Twilio Intelligence product - a platform which enables our customers to understand the meaning of every customer interaction they have, and drive automation flows based on the content of what their customers are saying.

Reporting to the VP GM A.I., as the most senior engineering leader on the Twilio AI team, you will champion operational excellence within the team and throughout the company. You will hire, retain and nurture world-class teams that can build products unlike anything in the market today.  You will be responsible for every aspect of engineering for the team from the underlying data, to the machine learning for speech transcription and natural language understanding, and the front and back end engineering. You will be taking this product from inception to scale, and responsible for ensuring we build and operate an architecture that exceeds our SLAs. 

Who?

• You are first and foremost a people person who has the ability to attract and motivate top talent. You are curious, collaborative, humble, and have a high EQ.
• You have 5+ years of people management experience, building and leading high performance diverse engineering teams in a fast paced environment, and 5+ years of experience building cloud-based high-scale distributed systems. You've built platforms before, and understand the differences required in building a platform vs a product.
• You take a data driven approach to decision making with clear understanding of good input and output metrics and the mechanisms to support them.
• You are passionate about engineering hygiene and operational excellence.  Demonstrated experience leading an engineering organization that delivers.  
• You have experience managing multi-layered and multi-disciplined engineering teams for 3+ years, ideally on a technically complex B2B or B2D cloud product. You have experience managing a remote and diverse international team, and collaborating with engineering across multiple time zones.
• You are a great communicator. You can write clear and compelling documents explaining strategy and technical details. You understand the power of great communication, and strive to always be improving at it. You also use those skills to be a connector - you have a knack for connecting people and building bridges across different teams and locations. 
• You have experience working with a top tier customer-facing product management team, and understand how to ingest customer-informed guidance and prioritization, and enabling your teams to translate that to a 'how', with clear prioritization. 
• You are strong technically and can converse in technical detail with talented engineers. Ideally you have hands-on experience shipping customer-facing apps with heavy ML and data components. However we will consider applicants without direct experience in ML but who are very strong technically, if you are outstanding in other areas. 
• You build process where it's needed. You know how to cut through bureaucracy when it's inefficient, but also how to create structure when it's needed. 
• You’re able to distill complex and ambiguous situations into actionable plans for your team, and are highly organized.. 
• Bonus: You have experience with contact center industry.

What?

• DON’T SETTLE: Provide support and guidance that enables the team to self-organize and to predictably deliver customer value. Foster a culture that encourages individual decision-making and innovation. Inclusive communication will also be critical to maintaining alignment and our culture across our global locations.
• WEAR THE CUSTOMER’S SHOES: Collaborate on engineering deliverables with product and engineering leaders across San Francisco, Colombia, Prague, Denver, Madrid, and London, ensuring that engineering decisions are always aligned with customer needs.
• EMPOWER OTHERS: Inspire your teams and manage their career development by providing coaching and mentoring to junior members while guiding senior contributors to maximize their potential. Provide continuous performance feedback, collaborate with employees on their objectives and provide a clear path for progression through personal development plans. Act as an ambassador for Twilio, recruiting and motivating top talent.
• BE INCLUSIVE: Be hands-on with the team - both product and engineering. You are not expected to deliver code, but you should possess enough technical experience in cloud-based infrastructure design and operations to be able to analyze the important decisions your team faces.
• WRITE IT DOWN: Institute engineering best practices - ensure the team produces high quality architectural blueprints, consistent coding standards, and operates and maintains systems that exceed our SLAs to customers. 
• BE AN OWNER: Foster leadership principles and behaviors throughout the organization to build up the next generation of leaders.
• Travel required - up to 10% of the time post-COVID

Why?

Today, Twilio powers the delivery of billions of the world’s communications. Customer conversations are one of the most informative indicators of a product and business’ health. They cover every time a customer was delighted, frustrated, buying more, closing their account, needing help, etc. But usually those conversations are trapped away in a black box, analyzed only by listening to them one by one, or with basic keyword search capabilities.

The Twilio AI team is building a platform that uses machine learning to transcribe, categorize, and extract meaning out of customer conversations so companies can evaluate every one of them and build workflows that automate actions, like prioritizing high value leads to follow up on or identifying customers likely to churn. Our goal is to help companies power more effective business processes and better customer engagement, by understanding the meaning in every conversation.

Where?

We are a team that believes in remote working and remote-friendly practices, and we are distributed across three continents. This position can be located in either the US or EU, either remote or (post-COVID) in one of Twilio's offices . What you will also get to experience is a company that believes in small teams for maximum impact; that strives to balance work and home life, that understands that this is a marathon, not a sprint; that continuously and purposefully builds an inclusive culture where everyone is able to do and be the best version of themselves. We seek people who naturally demonstrate our values, who are challenged by problems, empower others to thrive, people who can draw the owl and not be beholden to one playbook.

What We Offer

There are many benefits to working at Twilio, including, in addition to competitive pay, things like generous time-off, ample parental and wellness leave, healthcare, a retirement savings program, and much more. Offerings vary by location.

Twilio thinks big. Do you?

We like to solve problems, take initiative, pitch in when needed, and are always up for trying new things. That's why we seek out colleagues who embody our values — something we call Twilio Magic. Additionally, we empower employees to build positive change in their communities by supporting their volunteering and donation efforts.

So, if you're ready to unleash your full potential, do your best work, and be the best version of yourself, apply now!

If this role isn't what you're looking for, please consider other open positions.