Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

The role owns the design and evolution of Cresta's backend systems that power the AI platform serving enterprise customers. You will architect scalable, distributed services that enable real-time AI agents to deliver exceptional customer experiences across voice and digital channels. This position drives technical strategy, mentors engineers, and builds production systems at the intersection of AI and enterprise software. You will partner closely with ML teams to operationalize AI capabilities and build the runtime infrastructure that powers AI agents at scale. The role provides the opportunity to explore different team areas to find the best fit for your skills and career goals within a high-impact environment. You will lead cross-team technical initiatives from design through production, ensuring systems meet enterprise demands.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and lead the evolution of large-scale distributed backend systems, driving cross-team technical initiatives from design through production.
• Build high-performance, fault-tolerant backend services that support real-time AI agents, conversation intelligence, and enterprise integrations.
• Partner with ML engineers to operationalize AI capabilities, building runtime infrastructure and orchestration systems for AI agents at scale.
• Design and optimize data storage and retrieval systems to enable real-time analytics and insights across conversational data.
• Drive continuous improvements in system performance, cost efficiency, and scalability to handle high-volume production workloads.
• Mentor senior engineers, influence technical roadmap, and raise the bar for engineering quality across multiple teams.
• Implement robust observability, monitoring, and reliability practices to ensure production excellence and system resilience.
• Collaborate with product and operations teams to define APIs, service boundaries, and integration patterns for complex workflows.
• Optimize database design and data pipelines to support both transactional and analytical workloads efficiently.
• Contribute to the development of developer-facing tooling, including CLIs, SDKs, and testing frameworks that enhance team productivity.

Requirements

• Hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Bring 8+ years of experience building scalable backend systems in production environments.
• Demonstrate proven experience leading large-scale distributed system architecture with deep understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, state management, and concurrency.
• Show strong proficiency in at least one major programming language such as Python, Go, Java, or C++.
• Exhibit strong API design expertise using REST and gRPC, along with service-oriented architectures.
• Have hands-on experience with database design and optimization across both SQL and NoSQL systems.
• Possess practical experience with containerization and orchestration using Kubernetes and Docker.
• Show cloud platform expertise on AWS, GCP, or Azure with strong security knowledge and best practices.
• Have experience building developer-facing tooling including CLIs, SDKs, and testing frameworks.
• Demonstrate strong expertise in system reliability, observability, monitoring, and production ownership including on-call responsibilities.
• Communicate effectively for technical decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship.
• Maintain high standards for code quality, testing, and engineering best practices in all implementations.

Nice to have

• Effective use of AI-assisted coding tools such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex is preferred.

Practical notes

• This role is offered as a remote position based in Canada.
• Engagement details are to be confirmed from source information.

The role is part of Cresta's mission to unlock the true potential of the customer experience by 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 for the world's leading companies. These organizations include United Airlines, Cox Communications, and Marriott, who rely on Cresta to power world-class customer experiences daily. Cresta was born from the Stanford AI Lab and has raised more than $270 million from leading investors such as a16z, Greylock, and Sequoia. The company's leadership includes some of the most prominent minds in AI today, with CEO Ping Wu having 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 expected to redefine how people interact with businesses every day, and you are invited to build that future at Cresta by contributing to backend systems that support scalable, reliable, and intelligent conversational platforms. This position is ideal for a Staff Software Engineer who is motivated by large-scale challenges, mentorship, and producing systems that directly impact enterprise customers across multiple industries.