Lead Software Engineer - People Manager (London Based 2-3x week)

Overview

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

Join us as a Lead Software Engineer (People Manager) on our Data - Engineering team. You will play a key role in delivering the next generation of our no-code agent studio platform. In this role, you’ll lead 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.

You’ll balance hands-on technical design with people leadership, shaping architecture, reviewing code, and helping your team grow through clear feedback and development paths. Working closely with Product, you’ll turn ambitious ideas into scalable, reliable systems that power millions of AI-driven conversations.

This is a role for someone who loves both building and leading: setting the technical direction, driving predictable delivery, and cultivating a culture where engineers thrive and great software gets shipped.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a cross-functional team of engineers, balancing hands-on technical work with people leadership.
• Participate directly in review cycles and career development paths for the team, while setting the bar for technical quality and maintainability.
• Drive sprint and review cycles, ensuring clear goals, predictable delivery, and accountability across the team.
• Partner closely with Product to translate business goals into an actionable roadmap and measurable outcomes.
• Drive the software architecture of our multitenant conversational AI platform, ensuring robustness, scalability, and reliability—particularly in externally facing developer APIs.
• Champion and enforce strong engineering standards and best practices across the team.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading a team of 3+ engineers, including sprint planning, performance reviews, technical mentorship, technical project planning, scoping, architecture and delivery.
• Experience coaching engineers through design decisions, trade-offs, and technical challenges.
• Comfortable leading people and setting technical direction while staying closely engaged with the engineering work.
• 5+ years of professional experience as a Software Engineer in a people management role, with a track record of delivering production features.
• Significant expertise in Python and TypeScript is a must.
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

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
• Telehealth EAP 24/7 for confidential support
• Enhanced parental leave
• Bike-to-Work scheme
• Annual learning and development allowance
• One-off WFH allowance at joining
• Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes
• Menopause care programme with Maven
• Private healthcare and dental cover, discounts on gym memberships and mental health programs

At PolyAI, we take pride in our values. Our core values shape our culture and our impact.

Our Core Values

• Only the best
• Ownership
• Relentlessly improve
• Bias for action
• Disagree and commit
• Build for people

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 business needs without regard 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.

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