Director of Engineering, Marketing Agent Platform

Attentive sends billions of messages each year for more than 8,000 brands, helping drive tens of billions of dollars in revenue for our customers. We're building the next generation of that decision-making system: an autonomous marketing agent designed to transform how brands plan, execute, and optimize their marketing. Marketers will set the goals and boundaries, while the platform develops strategies, takes action, measures results, and continuously improves over time. This hybrid role is based in our New York office, with in-office collaboration Tuesday through Thursday each week.

Responsibilities

Build the engineering systems that make the autonomous marketing agent possible; Work at the intersection of agentic planning, real-time behavioral signals, platform capabilities, experimentation, and reliable execution at massive scale; Turn increasingly sophisticated AI systems into dependable products that can make and act on millions of marketing decisions; Help extend the platform through APIs and MCP across a brand's broader marketing stack

Requirements

3+ years managing engineers, 8+ years engineering; Has seen and helped build engineering excellence at a top-tier organization; Sets an ambitious bar for talent and execution, knows how to hire and lead an A+ team, and brings strong technical opinions with the curiosity to challenge their own assumptions; Understands the interface between product engineering, ML, and data science, and is fluent enough to be a real partner; Understands what a model needs from the platform, without needing to own the model; Has shipped agentic or LLM-backed systems and knows the production tradeoffs of tool use, orchestration, and retrieval; Strong on distributed, data-heavy systems: streaming, event-driven, cost-aware inference; Tracks the field closely, has a real view on what shipped last quarter and why it matters, and has killed their own work when something better arrived; Still writes code. Hires well, gives direct feedback, holds a high performance bar, and builds accountability without drama

Nice to have

Startup mindset, scaled environment: moves quickly, embraces ambiguity, and takes ownership; AI at massive data scale: builds intelligent systems that use rich, high-volume behavioral data; High-impact ownership: energized by one of the company's biggest strategic bets; Technical and product leadership: wants meaningful influence over team, architecture, technical direction, and roadmap

Benefits

Competitive perks and benefits, from health & wellness to equity