Lead Engineer - AI Agent Voice Experience

About the role

Cresta is seeking a talented Lead Engineer to revolutionize AI-driven voice interactions within the customer service sector. This position emphasizes the enhancement of AI's ability to comprehend, respond, and empathize during real-time conversations. You will play a crucial role in advancing the end-to-end voice AI systems that influence millions of customer interactions daily.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design, develop, and implement machine learning systems tailored for real-time voice interactions, focusing on technologies such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and agentic reasoning.
• Improve the quality of voice AI through meticulous error analysis, data refinement, and the creation of performance metrics, ensuring practical effectiveness in real-world scenarios.
• Create comprehensive evaluation frameworks for intricate voice and agent systems, measuring key performance indicators such as accuracy, resilience, speed, faithfulness, naturalness, and task completion.
• Troubleshoot and resolve challenges within the voice technology stack, addressing issues like transcription errors, inaccuracies in response generation, and context management.
• Develop and implement low-latency machine learning systems that enhance user experience by incorporating features like backchanneling and emotional comprehension.
• Collaborate closely with platform and backend engineers to integrate real-time inference, manage streaming data, ensure quality oversight, and facilitate continuous model updates in production.
• Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to seamlessly integrate voice intelligence into the Cresta platform.
• Mentor junior engineers, contribute to the technical strategy, and help shape the future direction of Cresta's voice AI initiatives.

Requirements

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Machine Learning, AI, or a related discipline; a Master's or Ph.D. is highly desirable.
• At least 5 years of experience in developing, evaluating, and deploying machine learning systems in a production context.
• Demonstrated capability to lead technically oriented teams in fast-paced environments, with strong communication skills to influence cross-functional decisions and elevate engineering practices.
• A well-defined technical vision for the advancement of voice AI technologies.
• Significant expertise in at least one area such as speech recognition, speech processing, natural language processing, generative AI, or voice AI.
• Extensive experience in model evaluation, benchmarking, error analysis, and quality improvement for machine learning systems in production.
• A solid grasp of transformer models, embeddings, retrieval mechanisms, and large-scale training or inference methodologies.
• Proven experience in designing and deploying real-time machine learning systems that meet stringent requirements for latency, scalability, and reliability.
• Familiarity with building data pipelines and tools for experimentation, measurement, and large-scale quality assessment.
• Ability to connect research and engineering, effectively translating innovative concepts into production-ready systems.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) quality metrics, including Word Error Rate (WER) and task-specific evaluation techniques.
• Familiarity with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, agentic workflows, multi-step reasoning systems, or evaluation techniques based on large language models (LLMs).
• Knowledge of streaming inference, real-time voice processing pipelines, or media systems.
• Experience collaborating with infrastructure or platform teams on the deployment, monitoring, and reliability of production machine learning systems.
• Background in contact center AI, conversational intelligence, or enterprise voice solutions.

Skills & tools

• Proficiency in Python
• Familiarity with machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch
• Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Knowledge of speech recognition technologies
• Expertise in natural language processing (NLP)
• Experience with generative AI models
• Understanding of real-time systems
• Skills in data analysis and visualization tools

Practical notes

• Compensation for this role ranges from $205,000 to $270,000 in base salary, along with equity options.
• Benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance, flexible paid time off, paid parental leave, retirement savings support, a budget for remote work setup, and monthly allowances for wellness and communication.
• All official communications from Cresta will be conducted via the @cresta.ai email domain.
• Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

About the company

Save money, increase revenue, and build customer loyalty with the only unified platform for human and AI agents that transforms every customer experience.