Lead Engineer - AI Agent Voice Experience

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.

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

• 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

• Salary: $205,000–$270,000 + Equity
• We offer competitive, location-based pay and a comprehensive benefits package.

Note: This description reflects the job posting content as provided.