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 an [... source excerpt omitted ...] 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 th [... source excerpt omitted ...] 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. pref