Director, Engineering & Technology
Slang
IT
New York, NY, USA
Posted on Mar 8, 2025
Company Summary:
Slang.ai is redefining customer engagement through conversational AI, making every interaction seamless and efficient. Our mission is to transform the restaurant industry by providing the ultimate voice AI solution for consistently outstanding customer experiences. At Slang.ai, we foster a culture of innovation, inclusivity, and growth, ensuring that every "Slangsta" (employee) feels valued and connected to our broader AI driven impact.
What Your Experience Will Be:
As Director of Technology at Slang.ai, you will own engineering leadership, IT infrastructure, and security, ensuring that we build and maintain a high-velocity, high-impact technology team. This is a player-coach role, where you will lead and mentor engineers while stepping in to support critical technical initiatives as needed. You will be responsible for scaling our engineering function, developing and maintaining a high-performance culture, and adapting our IT and security infrastructure as we grow with resources to support this in order to enable Slang.ai’s continued growth. This role reports to the VP of Product & Technology and requires strong technical expertise, leadership, and the ability to drive operational excellence across multiple functions.
Why You Belong Here & How You Will Grow:
Slang.ai is at a pivotal stage of growth, offering the opportunity to build and lead a high-velocity engineering team. This role allows you to influence strategic technical decisions, drive security and IT best practices, and establish an engineering culture of excellence. You will have the ability to mentor and develop engineers while working closely with executive leadership to shape the future of the company’s technical direction. This position provides the chance to refine leadership skills, contribute to product innovation, and create scalable technical solutions that directly impact the company’s success.
What success looks like
- Lead and manage the engineering team, fostering a culture of excellence, accountability, and continuous learning.
- Drive high-velocity software development, ensuring that our engineering team can make timely decisions to hard technical problems while delivering impactful improvements. .
- Oversee IT operations to ensure secure, scalable, and efficient infrastructure that supports the entire company.
- Develop and implement security best practices, ensuring compliance with industry standards and protecting customer data.
- Define and execute a technical roadmap that prepares Slang for the future and helps bring our long term product vision to life..
- Implement engineering best practices, including CI/CD, DevOps, observability, and scalable system design, and adherence to design patterns for clean code.
- Recruit, retain, and develop top-tier engineering talent, establishing career growth frameworks and mentoring future leaders.
- Act as a hands-on technical leader, stepping in as a player-coach when necessary to unblock complex challenges and helping with scope negotiations when necessary.
- Deeply understand the problems Slang.ai is solving for their customers. You will be expected to actively collaborate cross-functionally with Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing teams to proactively ensure engineering is aligned with business priorities.
- Drive IT strategy and security policies, ensuring compliance with SOC 2, GDPR, and other regulatory requirements.
- This is a high-impact leadership role where you will set the foundation for a world-class engineering team, ensuring that Slang.ai continues to scale efficiently while maintaining high-quality and secure operations.
Key outcomes
- Engineering team excellence: You create a high-performing engineering organization that attracts top talent, helps individuals reach their maximum potential, and has ownership over their work.
- High-velocity software development: You create highly efficient engineering processes, enabling engineers to do their best work while keeping them accountable to deliver results that are impactful and timely.
- Security & IT operations maturity: You implement strong security policies, ensuring data protection and compliance.
- Technical scalability: You lead architectural improvements, ensuring our platform scales efficiently with growth.
- Cross-functional impact: You collaborate with Product, Growth, and Customer Success teams, aligning technology with business needs.
What you will bring
- 12+ years of experience in software engineering
- 5+ years of experience managing engineering teams, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
- Experience leading high-velocity software development teams in a fast-scaling environment.
- Strong hands-on technical background, with expertise in modern cloud architectures, DevOps, and security best practices.
- Proven ability to build scalable, reliable systems while optimizing developer productivity.
- Deep knowledge of IT operations, security frameworks (SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001), and compliance.
- Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and observability best practices.
- Strong cross-functional leadership skills, working closely with Product, Growth, and other business units.
- Ability to balance strategic leadership with hands-on execution when needed.
- Comfortable overseeing IT and security needs as they arise
How Work Affects My Life:
Working as a Senior AI Engineer at Slang Engineering will offer a unique opportunity to contribute to the advancement of conversational AI technology. Through their work on developing and optimizing AI systems, the successful candidate will gain a deeper understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI, as well as the ethical considerations surrounding its use. This experience will broaden their perspective on the potential impact of AI on society and shape their worldview accordingly.
Slang Engineering's emphasis on innovation, collaboration, and personal growth aligns with the values of a talented and ambitious AI engineer. The company's commitment to providing employees with opportunities for professional development and the freedom to explore new ideas demonstrates its recognition of the value of its employees and their contributions. By joining Slang Engineering, the successful candidate will find an environment where their skills and expertise are valued, and where they can make a meaningful impact on the future of conversational AI.
Our Vision
Calling a business shouldn’t feel like a robot-hostage situation, where you’re forced to listen to horrible music and can't reach a human, while enduring a soulless voice uttering "I'm sorry I didn't quite get that" on repeat for eternity. (shudder) That’s why we started Slang.ai. We use the latest AI and audio wizardry to make transacting via voice so enjoyable it’s more human than human. By 2030, we will save businesses and consumers 1 billion minutes of precious time while transforming voice channels into the preferred mode of communication (it's faster and easier than text).
We have backgrounds building product at companies like Spotify, Buzzfeed, the New York Times, and OpenTable —shipping experiences that have reached hundreds of millions of users. Now, we’re using our backgrounds to start a new culture, one that puts product and human-centered design above all else while fostering constant learning and growth. Sound like something you’d like to be part of? Get on board.
Our Values
Overachiever Fever. We’re overachievers (we don’t know any other way)
Learner Fervor. We take every opportunity to learn (especially when it’s hard)
Humility Ability. We approach each other with curiosity and openness (know-it-alls not welcome!)
SMB MVP. We’re an expert member of our customers’ teams (we earn their trust)
