Lead Software Engineer (London based 3x a Week)

PolyAI automates customer service through lifelike voice assistants that let customers lead a conversation. Our voice assistants make it possible for businesses to deliver outstanding customer service that rivals their human agents. Our customers, which include the world’s leading logos, are expanding how they use our platform, driving automation of critical customer service operations and integrating PolyAI into their daily customer service workflows.

We’re looking for talented Lead Software Engineers to join one of our three high impact teams: Runtime, Data, and Product Engineering. All three teams work closely together, share high engineering standards, and solve challenging technical problems at scale, but each has its own mission and area of focus.

• Runtime: own the global infrastructure that powers real-time voice interactions. In this role, you’ll work at the core of the agentic process - streaming audio, transcribing speech, using LLMs and acting on their output, and synthesising natural voice. You’ll design and optimise systems across VoIP, WebRTC to deliver low-latency, secure, and reliable conversations. Your work directly shapes the user experience of every call, driving down response times, improving comprehension, and ensuring we meet strict SLAs for performance and security.
• Data: play a key role in delivering the next generation of our no-code agent studio platform. In this role, you’ll be leading the design and development of features that power insight generation, reporting, and the data-driven backbone of our no-code platform for building voice assistants.
• Product Engineering: help shape our cutting-edge low-code platform. This role offers the opportunity to work end-to-end, from design to implementation, on creating features which enable a simple user experience for interacting with complex AI systems.

You’ll go through a centralised hiring process that lets us get to know your skills and preferences, while you explore which team best aligns with your interests and expertise. At the end, we’ll match you with the team where you can have the most impact.

Depending On Team, Responsibilities Can Include

• Manage and lead a cross-functional Software Engineer team to deliver enterprise-grade conversational AI platform.
• Lead the software architecture of our multitenant conversational AI platform, in charge of its robustness and scalability.
• Work with PMs to define the roadmap of our studio product and ensure we meet the business goals.
• Advocate and implement adequate SWE standards across the entire tech team.
• Manage career development of the reports.
• You will need to be in our London based office (Paddington) 2-3 days of the week.

Requirements

• 6+ years as a professional Software Engineer, with significant experience delivering features in production.
• Expertise in Python and bonus for experience with React.
• Experience leading a team of 3+ Engineers.
• Experience leading technical projects, including scoping, architecture, and delivery.
• Hands-on experience in designing, deploying, and maintaining RESTful APIs.
• Experience with one or more cloud services: AWS, GCP, Azure.
• Understanding of algorithms, data structures, system design and complexity analysis.

We currently have multiple engineering roles open across different teams. Please apply to the one role that feels like the best match for your skills and experience. Our Talent team will review your application against all open positions. If we believe you may be a stronger fit for another role or team, we’ll ensure your application is considered there as well.

We offer competitive compensation based on experience, expertise, and the level of responsibility. This role also includes equity, giving you the opportunity to share in the long-term success of the business. The listed expectations reflect what we're hiring for, so we encourage you to review the job description carefully.

Benefits

💰 Participation in the company’s employee share options plan

🏝 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays

🏡 Flexible working from home policy

🌎 Work from outside of the UK for up to 6 months each year

🫂TELUS Health EAP 24/7 - offers you and your chosen family confidential, judgment-free support for any work, health, or life challenge

🧡 Enhanced parental leave

🚲 Bike2Work scheme

📚 Annual learning and development allowance

🏡 We’re all about making WFH work for you - that’s why we offer a one-off WFH allowance when you join. Offering perks like noise-cancelling headphones or a comfortable desk chair to boost your comfort and focus!

👨‍👩‍👧 Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes

🌸 Menopause care programme with Maven

🏥 Private healthcare and dental cover, discounts on gym members and relaxation apps, and access to a range of mental health programs

At PolyAI, we take great pride in our values - they guide everything we do. We believe that a strong culture leads to meaningful work and lasting impact.

Our Core Values Are

Only the best

We expect the best from our people, we hire people that expect the best from themselves, and we nurture this drive for excellence.

Ownership

We care deeply about what we do. We take ownership of our initiatives, decisions and outcomes.

Relentlessly improve

We demand more from ourselves and are always evolving. Continuous, obsessive improvement is the only way we will transform the world of conversational AI.

Bias for action

Our world moves quickly and so do we. We take calculated risks and we deliver impact fast.

Disagree and commit

We are all working toward the same goal. If we donʼt agree with something, we work hard to understand it and when a decision is made, we accept it and give it our all.

Build for people

We want the world to enjoy the experiences they have with us. We are building for a future that prefers automation.

_PolyAI is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment decisions at PolyAI will be based on the business needs without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, neurodiversity status or disability status.

_Kindly find the Privacy Notice for our recruitment process by following the link here. This document provides important information regarding how we handle your personal data throughout the recruitment journey.