AI Technical Lead

We're the team behind the AI-powered customer engagement platform that's transforming how businesses connect with their customers - turning every conversation into a revenue-driving moment.

Our platform helps contact centre teams achieve their goals through intelligent automation, predictive insights, and seamless customer experiences. We build technology that empowers people, not replaces them.

We are proud of our reputation for combining cutting-edge tech with down-to-earth people, we have big ambitions and a clear sense of who we are.  Our culture is driven by our values: we take ownership, move fast, challenge the status quo, and learn constantly. Working at MaxContact means being stretched, you’ll be trusted with responsibility early, expected to think commercially, and encouraged to act decisively. We don’t stand still, and neither will you. 

At the same time, we believe high performance only works in a safe, supportive environment. You’ll be surrounded by smart, driven people who want to see you succeed, who value openness and honesty, and who see mistakes as part of learning quickly and getting better.

We're builders, problem-solvers, and customer champions who believe in innovation with purpose, human-first technology, and delivering results that matter. You'll work alongside passionate colleagues building technology that directly impacts how thousands of businesses connect with millions of customers every day. If you’re ambitious, curious, and excited by the idea of building something meaningful in a fast-moving tech business.

You’ll lead a high-impact team building production-grade, cost-efficient, enterprise-ready AI systems used by real customers, at real scale.

We are looking for an ambitious and impact-driven Technical Lead to lead the development of next-generation AI solutions, combining hands-on engineering with team leadership and architectural ownership.

As Technical Lead for AI Agents, you will own the architecture and delivery of our AI solutions powering:

• Voice & Omnichannel engagement
• Chatbots and Voice Agents
• Conversation analytics and workflow automation

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who wants to shape the technical direction of agentic AI in a SaaS platform, not just experiment with LLMs.

Key Responsibilities

Systems (Data, Model & Predictability)

• Delivery of AI features used in live customer interactions (chat + voice)
• Own architecture for agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, model serving and the data stack supporting models.
• Design and operate cloud-native production services, including Kubernetes/serverless microservices, model hosting and vector search infrastructure.
• Set the standard for testing non-deterministic AI systems, leading the adoption of LLM-as-judge and automated evaluation frameworks as a core part of engineering and release discipline.
• Implement observability across models and services with metrics, dashboards and alerts for latency, availability, relevance and drift.
• Enforce secure data handling, encryption, tenancy and role-based access, plus audit logging and compliance processes.

People (Customers & Stakeholders)

• Represent the AI Agents team to Product, Sales, Customer Success and Platform teams, providing technical leadership and stakeholder alignment
• Mentor engineers through design and code reviews, technical coaching and active career development support.
• Lead customer-facing technical discussions and scope integrations, pilots and proofs of concept.

Process (Commercial & Operating Discipline)

• Lead sprint planning, backlog refinement and release coordination for the AI Agents team
• Enforce engineering standards, CI/CD, peer review, automated testing and release automation across the team
• Balance technical debt with roadmap commitments, prioritising work that preserves velocity and platform health.
• Own incident response, triage production issues, lead root-cause analysis and reduce mean time to recovery.

Values & Behaviours

• Customer Centric - Design and deliver features, integrations and reliability improvements that directly improve customer success.
• Own It - Take end-to-end responsibility for delivery, quality and technical debt, be accountable for successful outcomes.
• One Team -Collaborate tightly with Productand Platform to build trust, share goals, remove blockers and coach the team to succeed together.
• Make It Count -Prioritise solutions that improve reliability, scalability, model quality and long-term velocity with measurable results.
• Challenge The Status Quo - Continuously question assumptions and improve systems, tooling and processes.

Success Measures

• Customer value: AI Agents consistently solve real customer problems, reflected in positive customer feedback, higher First Contact Resolution (FCR), and improved business outcomes for our clients.
• Adoption and scale: Strong and growing adoption of AI Agents, evidenced by customers live in production, increasing monthly active agents and conversations, and a high pilot-to-production conversion rate.
• Engineering excellence and innovation: A high-performing AI engineering team delivering reliably, safely and predictably, with strong CI/CD, automated testing (including LLM-as-judge), production observability, and a culture of continuous experimentation and innovation that translates new AI capabilities into customer value.

What Success Looks Like

3 months

• Clear technical roadmap for AI Agents with measurable success metrics
• Production telemetry in place for quality, latency and cost
• Initial gains in model accuracy and end-to-end performance

6 months

• Expanded agent capabilities embedded across chat, voice and workflows
• Predictable delivery cadence with strong CI/CD and automated testing
• Non-deterministic testing standardised, with LLM-as-judge-based evaluation, golden datasets and automated regression testing acting as mandatory quality gates in CI/CD.

Training & Enablement (You will receive)

• Structured onboarding plan with defined milestone
• Dedicated time for learning and personal development
• Budget for relevant certifications and conference attendance
• Pairing and mentorship opportunities
• Regular 1:1s and coaching from leadership
• Opportunities to lead discovery and POCs
• Training on security and compliance 

Skills & Experience

• Professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a technical lead or senior lead role owning end-to-end delivery.
• Hands-on experience designing and shipping production LLM and agent systems, including RAG, orchestration, model serving and inference at scale.
• Strong Python skills and practical experience with ML frameworks
• Experience with agent/orchestration frameworks such as LangChain
• Experience with vector databases and semantic search 
• Cloud-native production experience with Kubernetes, Docker and Helm, and one or more public clouds (ideally Azure)
• Solid backend engineering experience building microservices and event-driven systems, including message brokers and relational or NoSQL datastores.
• MLOps and ModelOps experience covering CI/CD for models, data pipelines/ETL, feature stores, model evaluation, drift detection and lifecycle automation.
• Proven observability and reliability practices using metrics, tracing and logging, with hands-on use of Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry or ELK, and leading incident response/post-mortems.
• Strong software engineering disciplines including automated testing (unit, integration and e2e), code review, release automation and deployment safety.
• Practical knowledge of enterprise security and compliance for data protection, encryption, tenancy or RBAC, audit logging and GDPR-style controls.
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration, stakeholder management and mentoring skills, and experience in customer-facing technical discussions

Desirable

• Exposure to conversational or speech technologies, contact-centreand telephony/VoIP domains.
• Front-end experience with React or Vue to support end-to-end product delivery.
• Certifications in cloud, DevOps, SRE or MLOps, and experience producing enterprise case studies or technical customer references.

Benefits and Perks

• 25 days annual leave plus your birthday off - So you can genuinely switch off, recharge, and bring your best self to work.
• Increased holiday entitlement with length of service - We recognise commitment and loyalty. As you grow with MaxContact, we give more back because owning it over time should be rewarded.
• Enhanced maternity and paternity packages -We support our people at every stage of life. By enabling families to take meaningful time when it matters most.
• Life insurance - Providing peace of mind for you and your loved ones reflects our commitment to doing the right thing and owning our responsibility to support our people beyond the workplace.
• Enhanced pension options- We help you invest in your future, not just your role today enabling you to make it count over the long term.
• Company-paid sick leave- We trust our people to take the time they need to recover and return well.
• Personal training allowance - We invest in your growth and encourage continuous learning. You’re empowered to develop your skills, challenge yourself, and challenge the status quo for your career and for our customers.
• Buy and sell holiday options- Flexibility matters. This option allows you to shape your working life around what’s important to you.
• Social, charity and culture committee events- We believe strong connections build great teams. These activities bring people together, support our communities, and reinforce our one team mindset.
• Hybrid working (minimum two days in the office)- We balance flexibility with collaboration.