Cresta unlocks the true potential of the customer experience, turning every conversation into a competitive advantage. Cresta’s unified AI platform combines conversational AI agents, real-time human agent augmentation, and comprehensive conversation intelligence to drive revenue and efficiency gains across every channel. The world’s leading companies, including United Airlines, Cox Communications, and Marriott, use Cresta to power world-class customer experiences every day.
Born from the Stanford AI Lab, Cresta has raised more than $270 million from the world’s leading investors, including a16z, Greylock, and Sequoia. Cresta’s leadership includes some of the leading minds in AI today. Our CEO, Ping Wu, founded and led Google's Contact Center AI and Vertex AI platforms before joining Cresta to build the future of AI-driven customer experiences.
Over the next few years, AI is going to redefine how people all over the world interact with businesses every day. Come build that future at Cresta.
We're seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of our backend systems that power Cresta's AI platform.
customer experiences through voice and digital channels. This role offers the opportunity to shape technical strategy, mentor engineers, and build
This is a generic backend engineering hire. Team matching will be conducted during the later stages of the hiring
process based on your interests, experience, and team needs. You'll have the opportunity to explore different team areas
and find the best fit for your skills and career goals.
Key Responsibilities
- Architecture & Leadership: Lead the architecture and evolution of large-scale distributed backend systems, driving
cross-team technical initiatives from design through production
- Scalable Systems Design: Build high-performance, fault-tolerant backend services supporting real-time AI agents,
conversation intelligence, and enterprise integrations
- AI/ML Collaboration: Partner with ML engineers to operationalize AI capabilities, building the runtime infrastructure
and orchestration systems that power AI agents at scale
- Data & Storage Solutions: Design and optimize data storage and retrieval systems for real-time analytics and insights
- Production Excellence: Drive continuous improvements in system performance, cost efficiency, and scalability to handle
high-volume production workloads
- Technical Mentorship: Mentor senior engineers, influence technical roadmap, and raise the bar for engineering quality
across teams
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
- 8+ years building scalable backend systems in production environments
- Proven experience leading large-scale distributed system architecture with deep understanding of consistency, fault
tolerance, state management, and concurrency
- Strong proficiency in at least one major programming language (Python, Go, Java, C++, or similar)
- Strong API design expertise (REST, gRPC) and service-oriented architectures
- Experience with database design and optimization across SQL and NoSQL systems
- Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)
- Cloud platform expertise (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with strong security knowledge
- Experience building developer-facing tooling (CLIs, SDKs, testing frameworks)
- Strong expertise in system reliability, observability, monitoring, and production ownership (including on-call)
- Excellent communication skills for technical decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship
- High standards for code quality, testing, and engineering best practices
Preferred Qualifications
- Effective use of AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, etc.) to significantly boost development
productivity
- Deep understanding of real-time communication systems, low-latency design, and high-availability architectures
- Proven track record with third-party enterprise platform integrations
- Experience with Temporal workflow orchestration platform
- Hands-on experience with Postgres, ClickHouse, and Elasticsearch
- Experience with Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms or contact center systems
- Familiarity with AI Agents, LLM-based systems, or AI orchestration platforms
- Real-time voice or streaming media systems background
- LLM integration experience (streaming inference, prompt orchestration, RAG)
- Infrastructure-as-code and GitOps workflows
What We Offer
- We offer Cresta employees a variety of medical, dental, and vision plans, designed to fit you and your family’s needs
- Paid parental leave to support you and your family
- Monthly Health & Wellness allowance
- Work from home office stipend to help you succeed in a remote environment
- Lunch reimbursement for in-office employees
- PTO: 3 weeks in Canada
Perks & Benefits:
- We offer Cresta employees a variety of medical, dental, and vision plans, designed to fit you and your family’s needs
- Paid parental leave to support you and your family
- Monthly Health & Wellness allowance
- Work from home office stipend to help you succeed in a remote environment
- Lunch reimbursement for in-office employees
- PTO: 3 weeks in Canada
Compensation for this position includes a base salary, equity, and a variety of benefits. Actual base salaries will be based on candidate-specific factors, including experience, skillset, and location, and local minimum pay requirements as applicable. We are actively hiring for this role in the US and Canada. Your recruiter can provide further details.
We have noticed a rise in recruiting impersonations across the industry, where scammers attempt to access candidates' personal and financial information through fake interviews and offers. All Cresta recruiting email communications will always come from the @cresta.ai domain. Any outreach claiming to be from Cresta via other sources should be ignored. If you are uncertain whether you have been contacted by an official Cresta employee, reach out to [email protected]
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
- 8+ years building scalable backend systems in production
- Proven experience leading large-scale distributed system architecture (consistency, fault tolerance, state management, concurrency)
- Proficiency in at least one major programming language (Python, Go, Java, C++ or similar)
- API design expertise (REST, gRPC) and service-oriented architectures
- Database design and optimization experience across SQL and NoSQL systems
- Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)
- Cloud platform expertise (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with strong security knowledge
- Experience building developer-facing tooling (CLIs, SDKs, testing frameworks)
- Expertise in system reliability, observability, monitoring, and production ownership (including on-call)
- Excellent communication skills for technical decision-making and cross-functional collaboration
- High standards for code quality, testing, and engineering best practices
- Effective use of AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, etc.)
- Deep understanding of real-time communication systems, low-latency design, and high-availability architectures
- Proven track record with third-party enterprise platform integrations
- Experience with Temporal workflow orchestration platform
- Hands-on experience with Postgres, ClickHouse, and Elasticsearch
- Experience with Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms or contact center systems
- Familiarity with AI Agents, LLM-based systems, AI orchestration platforms, and LLM integration (streaming inference, prompt orchestration, RAG)
- Real-time voice or streaming media systems background
- Infrastructure-as-code and GitOps workflow experience
What We Do
Cresta is for sales and customer service teams who need to close the performance gap between their top performers and the rest. Our real-time expertise AI helps contact center agents unlock their full potential by uncovering expert behaviors from every customer conversation and amplifies them with real-time assistance and coaching. By nudging best practices around objection responses, expectation setting, troubleshooting, and more: Cresta supercharges agents to focus on what really matters; their customer interactions. Cresta brings together industry-leading AI experts, proven leadership, and top-tier investors including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Andy Bechtolsheim, Mark Leslie and Vivi Nevo.
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