Director of Engineering

ABOUT US: Founded in 2020, Regal is the AI Agent Platform. Regal gives every company the tools to transform customer communications with delightful AI Agents that are connected to your data, easy to customize and monitor, always available, and ready to take action. Power better support, sales, and operations - with way less effort. Our founders, Alex Levin and Rebecca Greene, helped build Angi (Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Handy) to over $1.5B in revenue.

Based in Manhattan, we’re building an in-person culture of entrepreneurs who want to win and build something meaningful. We’re backed by top investors including Founder Collective, Homebrew, and Emergence Capital.

Come join us as we create a category-defining company, and follow Regal's company page on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date on our journey and current job openings!

We’re moving fast, and the numbers speak for themselves:

Partnered with enterprise brands like Google, AAA, Ro, Coursera

Raised $82M (top tier investors including Emergence & Homebrew)

Completed 500M+ calls

Driven $7B revenue for customers

Scaled to $##M ARR

Built amazing NYC (Midtown) in office culture

ABOUT THE ROLE: We're hiring a Director of Engineering to own two of our most technically challenging areas: the real-time systems that power every live call, and the applied AI research that determines how those calls sound and feel.

You'll lead two teams: one responsible for the real-time call delivery infrastructure that handles every live voice interaction at scale, and one doing proprietary model work on the problems that matter most to voice quality, end-of-utterance detection, voice activity detection, answering machine detection, and STT accuracy. These are active, production-impacting problems, not research projects.

This is the right role for someone comfortable at the intersection of applied AI and real-time systems, not a pure researcher, and not a pure product EM. You'll work closely with Regal's Staff+ AI Engineering lead as a peer and collaborator, and you'll have room to grow into broader engineering ownership as the team scales.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Lead and develop engineers across two teams, set expectations, support career growth, and run a tight hiring bar. You thrive on managing people and view it as a privilege

Own the technical roadmap for real-time call delivery and applied voice AI, in collaboration with Product, AI Engineering, and the broader eng leadership team

Drive the applied AI roadmap: improving how AI agents talk to humans (pace, timing, accuracy, and warmth) and the contact center AI capabilities that make agents more effective in production

Do whatever it takes to unblock your teams, whether that's changing a process, pair debugging, or cutting through cross-functional friction

Work closely with product and engineering leadership to drive innovation and collaboration

Maintain a strong peer relationship with Regal's AI Engineering lead, collaborative, not territorial. Applied model work intersects with research; managing that handoff well is part of the job

Represent engineering in cross-functional conversations on voice quality, latency, and AI agent reliability

Be actively involved in hiring: sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding

WHAT YOU'LL OWN:

Real-time call delivery: The systems that route, handle, and manage live voice calls. Telephony reliability, call delivery at scale. This team is the layer where every agent capability meets every customer

Applied voice AI: Proprietary model work on the hardest voice quality problems: end-of-utterance (EOU) detection, voice activity detection (VAD), answering machine detection (AMD), STT accuracy, and p95 latency. Small team, high-leverage output

ABOUT YOU:

8+ years of experience in software engineering, with meaningful time in systems where latency and reliability are first-class constraints

4+ years in engineering management, including experience managing mid to senior level engineers

An entrepreneurial mindset, we're not looking for someone to run a playbook. We want you to help build it

Comfortable operating at the boundary of research and engineering, you know how to take a model improvement and turn it into a production system, and vice versa

Strong communication skills, you can translate complex technical tradeoffs for product stakeholders and work effectively with researchers

Excellent judgment on prioritization, applied AI work is inherently exploratory; you know how to scope it against production impact

NICE TO HAVE:

Hands-on experience with STT/TTS pipelines, voice activity detection, or telephony infrastructure

Prior work on latency-sensitive ML inference systems in production

Experience with LLM orchestration or agent evaluation frameworks

Familiarity with WebSockets, real-time audio, or WebRTC

Prior startup experience at the Series B-D stage

Benefits/Perks

We care about your health!

Medical, Dental, and Vision plans - 80% covered by the company

Flexible PTO & 11 paid holidays/year

We care about future you!

401k Plan

Paid parental leave

Pre-tax commuter benefits

We care about connection!

In-office breakfast and snacks daily

Happy hours, team outings, & annual off-sites

Complete laptop workstation

& more to come!

POSITION LOCATION & OFFICE DETAILS: This position is only available in New York City (HQ- Midtown). Hybrid roles are required in office T/W/TH and office optional M/F.

If you think you’re missing relevant experience but you’re hungry and a fast learner (and can prove it), we want to hear from you!

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

The reasonably estimated base salary for this role is provided as a range within this job description. All offers include a competitive equity package and some offers may additionally include a variable compensation component. Actual compensation is determined on an individualized basis taking into consideration factors such as the candidate's skills, location, qualifications, experience, and relevant education or training. In addition, Regal offers a comprehensive set of employee benefits which are listed above. Details about the compensation package will be finalized at the time of offer.