Lead Engineer - AI Agent Voice Experience

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.

About the role

We are looking for a Lead Engineer, AI Agent Voice Experience to help build the next generation of AI-powered voice systems for the contact center. In this role, you will work at the intersection of speech, language, and real-time production systems, improving how AI listens, understands, reasons, empathizes, and responds in live customer conversations. 

You will develop and improve machine learning systems that power voice experiences end to end, including automatic speech recognition, turn detection, agentic workflows, voice evaluation, text to speech, speech-to-speech models, and production optimization. You will partner closely with applied researchers, product managers, designers, forward deployed engineers, and platform engineers to ensure model and system improvements translate into measurable customer and business impact.

This role is ideal for someone who is excited by both model quality and production reality: designing rigorous evaluation frameworks, analyzing failure modes, improving latency and robustness, elevating caller interaction experience, and shipping systems that perform reliably at scale in real-time voice environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning systems that power real-time voice experiences, including speech to text turn detection, text to speech, speech to speech, reasoning and structured insight generation.
• Improve the quality of voice AI systems through error analysis, data curation, metric design, benchmarking, and iterative model improvement, with a strong focus on real-world performance.
• Build evaluation frameworks for complex voice and agentic systems, measuring metrics such as accuracy, robustness, latency, faithfulness, naturalness, professionalism, task completion, and cost.
• Diagnose and mitigate failure modes across the voice stack, including transcription errors, hallucinations, tool misuse, prompt brittleness, context drift, and multi-step reasoning breakdowns.
• Design, implement,  and optimize low-latency ML systems that deliver delightful caller experience (e.g., backchanneling, focusing on foreground speaker, interpreting caller’s emotions, responding with empathy).
• Partner with platform and backend engineers to productionize real-time inference, streaming pipelines, quality monitoring, and continuous model iteration.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, frontend, and backend teams to integrate voice intelligence seamlessly into Cresta’s platform.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to technical strategy, and help shape the roadmap for Cresta’s voice AI systems.

Qualifications we value

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field; Master’s or Ph.D. preferred.
• 5+ years of experience building, evaluating, and deploying machine learning systems in production.
• Demonstrated experience in leading fast-moving, highly technical teams. Strong communication skills, with the ability to influence cross-functional decisions and raise the engineering bar.
• Distinctive technical vision for the future of voice AI.
• Strong background in one or more of the following: speech recognition, speech processing, NLP, generative AI, or voice AI.
• Deep experience with model evaluation, benchmarking, error analysis, and quality improvement for production ML systems.
• Solid understanding of transformer-based models, embeddings, retrieval systems, and large-scale training or inference workflows.
• Experience designing and deploying real-time ML systems with strong requirements around latency, scalability, and reliability.
• Experience building data pipelines and tooling for experimentation, measurement, and large-scale quality analysis.
• Ability to work across research and engineering boundaries and translate promising ideas into production-grade systems.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with ASR quality metrics such as WER and task-level evaluation methodologies.
• Experience with RAG systems, agentic workflows, multi-step reasoning systems, or LLM-as-a-judge evaluation methods.
• Familiarity with streaming inference, real-time voice pipelines, or media systems.
• Experience working closely with infrastructure or platform teams on production ML deployment, observability, and reliability.
• Experience in contact center AI, conversational intelligence, or enterprise voice products. 

Perks & Benefits

We offer a comprehensive and people-first benefits package to support you at work and in life:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with plans to fit you and your family
• Flexible PTO
• Paid parental leave
• Retirement savings support
• Remote work setup budget or work-from-home stipend
• Monthly wellness and communication allowance
• In-office meal or lunch benefits for onsite employees

Compensation

Cresta’s approach to compensation is simple: recognize impact, reward excellence, and invest in our people. We offer competitive, location-based pay that reflects the market and what each individual brings to the table.

The posted base salary range represents what we expect to pay for this role in a given location. Final offers are shaped by factors like experience, skills, education, and geography. In addition to base pay, total compensation includes equity and a comprehensive benefits package for you and your family.

Salary Range: $205,000-$270,000 + Offers Equity

Our use of AI in recruiting: We may use AI tools in our recruiting process, which require human review and oversight. If you have questions about our use of AI or wish to opt out, please contact [email protected] (if you are opting out, please use the subject ‘Opt-Out’ in your email).

Recording & AI transcription: We do not authorize candidates to record or use AI transcription of any interview by phone, notetaker app, AI glasses, or other device. Candidates may request an exception or accommodation for review during the interview process as needed.

Recruiting impersonation scams: 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.