Manager, Software Engineering
TalkdeskAbout the Role
Talkdesk is looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead a specialised team focused on building and evolving our Voice & Telecommunications infrastructure. Your team develops the core real-time communications layer that powers millions of enterprise-grade interactions daily, leveraging open-source telecom components such as Kamailio, FreeSWITCH, and RTP Engine.
You will join and grow an existing engineering team, bringing continuity while raising the bar on technical excellence, culture, and delivery. As a hands-on leader, you will own the full engineering lifecycle and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our CCaaS platform. As comfortable diving into SIP signalling and media processing challenges as you are mentoring engineers and driving roadmap conversations.
What You'll Do
- Onboard into an existing team, quickly build trust and credibility, assess strengths and gaps, and grow the team's capabilities over time, including hiring when the team scales.
- Drive architectural decisions and technology choices related to VoIP, SIP, RTP, and open-source telecom stacks (Kamailio, FreeSWITCH, RTP Engine), ensuring the team makes the right long-term trade-offs.
- Champion the adoption of AI and AI-assisted development practices within the team. Foster a culture where engineers proactively leverage AI tools to improve productivity, accelerate delivery, and raise the quality bar.
- Plan and execute complex, multi-team projects: manage dependencies, align stakeholders, and deliver with predictability.
- Collaborate with Product Managers, Architects, SRE, and Platform teams to define clear priorities. Maintain a healthy balance between feature velocity and technical debt.
- Institute engineering best practices, code quality, testing, safe deployment, observability, to achieve five-nines (99.999%) SLA targets.
- Use data and metrics to drive continuous improvement in team productivity, software reliability, and operational excellence.
- Communicate the impact of technical debt to stakeholders and partner to systematically reduce it.
- Identify and remove roadblocks and cross-team dependencies proactively.
- Create a culture of reflection and retrospection, continuously improving processes, tooling, and ways of working.
- Develop the next generation of engineering leaders through coaching, personalised development plans, and ongoing performance feedback.
- Role model Talkdesk's engineering culture and values at all times.
What We're Looking For
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Telecommunications, or a related field.
- 10+ years of hands-on experience building distributed, highly scalable, and reliable enterprise software and SaaS systems.
- 5+ years of engineering management experience, with a demonstrated track record of hiring, growing, and retaining high-performing teams.
- Solid hands-on experience with open-source telecommunications technologies, including one or more of: Kamailio, FreeSWITCH, RTP Engine, SIP, WebRTC, or equivalent VoIP/media-processing stacks.
- Strong software engineering skills across technologies such as Java, Python, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Kafka, and AWS services.
- AI enthusiast. You actively use AI tools in your own workflow and know how to embed AI-assisted development practices into an engineering team's culture to increase output quality and speed meaningfully.
- Deep familiarity with agile practices, iterative development, CI/CD, and DevOps principles, including 24x7 production ownership.
- Ability to work alongside engineers when needed, not afraid to roll up your sleeves and get into the code.
- Excellent communicator, able to influence peers and leadership across time zones and seniority levels.
- Comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment and adapting to rapidly changing technology and business needs.
Nice to Have
- Experience with real-time media processing, codec handling, or SRTP/DTLS.
- Familiarity with cloud-native architectures on AWS.
- Experience joining and elevating an existing engineering team, assessing technical debt, cultural gaps, and individual development needs.
Talkdesk is pioneering a new era of Customer Experience Automation (CXA), redefining how the world’s most admired brands interact with their customers through AI. Our global team of courageous innovators is customer-obsessed, building AI-first solutions that put empathy, trust, and transparency at the center of every interaction. We foster an inclusive culture where diverse perspectives drive our success and every voice belongs. Combining the stability of a global leader with the agility of a disruptor, Talkdeskers are empowered with the autonomy to drive meaningful impact, while giving back to the communities and environment around us.
Talkdesk has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and in the G2 Overall Grid® Reports for AI Agents and Contact Center. With seven consecutive years on the Forbes Cloud 100 and multiple AI Breakthrough awards, there has never been a more exciting time to join us as we shape the future of customer experience automation!
Work Environment and Physical Requirements:
Primarily office-environment work, extended periods of sitting or standing, computer-based work. Limited lifting, and equipment usage limited to computer-related equipment (keyboards, mouse, etc.)
The Talkdesk story hinges on empathy and acceptance. It is the shared goal among all Talkdeskers to empower a new kind of customer hero through our innovative software solution, and we firmly believe that the best path to success for our mission is inclusivity, diversity, and genuine acceptance. To that end, we will hire, promote, work along, cheer for, bond with, and warmly welcome into the Talkdesk family all persons without regard to ethnic and racial identity, indigenous heritage, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, marital status, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status.