---
title: 'Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Cresta'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-machine-learning-engineer-cresta-united-states-xsh09mwp53ce'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Cresta

- **Company:** Cresta
- **Location:** United States
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-03-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cresta/jobs/4741284008

## Job description

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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pingwu/), 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:

Machine Learning Engineers at Cresta work across several high-impact AI initiatives. Final team placement is determined based on experience, strengths, and business needs.

Current focus areas include:

- Agentic Assist: Lead and build next-generation agentic AI systems that augment contact center agents in real time. This track requires strong pre-LLM ML foundations, deep expertise in LLMs and modern prompting techniques, a rapid prototyping mindset, and a proven ability to translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade systems.
- Agent & System Quality: Design evaluation frameworks and improve the reliability, robustness, and performance of LLM-powered agents. This includes diagnosing and mitigating failure modes such as hallucinations, retrieval errors, tool misuse, context drift, prompt brittleness, and multi-step reasoning breakdowns, while defining measurable quality metrics (e.g., accuracy, faithfulness, task completion, latency, and cost) for complex, non-deterministic systems.
- Insights: Architect and scale LLM and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines that ground models in enterprise data. This track focuses on building high-performance ML systems that process complex data, extract structured insights, and deliver real-time, actionable intelligence at scale.

Responsibilities:

- Define and lead the technical vision for Cresta’s next-generation Agentic AI systems, including Agentic Assist and enterprise AI Agents.
- Architect scalable, production-grade LLM systems that integrate reasoning, retrieval, planning, tool use, and real-time decision-making into cohesive, intelligent workflows.
- Design and evolve multi-agent orchestration frameworks that combine RAG, structured knowledge, domain-adapted models, and automated actions.
- Establish best practices for building robust, reliable, and cost-efficient LLM-powered systems in high-scale production environments.
- Own evaluation strategy for complex, non-deterministic AI systems, including offline benchmarking, online experimentation, LLM-as-a-judge methodologies, and systematic failure analysis.
- Proactively identify and mitigate agent failure modes such as hallucinations, tool misuse, retrieval errors, prompt brittleness, context drift, and multi-step reasoning breakdowns.
- Define measurable quality standards (accuracy, faithfulness, task completion, latency, cost efficiency, robustness) and drive continuous system improvement.
- Influence cross-team architecture decisions across ML, backend, and product engineering to ensure seamless integration of AI capabilities.
- Mentor senior engineers, raise the technical bar, and contribute to long-term AI strategy and roadmap planning.
- Translate cutting-edge research advances into practical, high-impact production systems.

Qualifications We Value:

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field; Master’s or Ph.D. strongly preferred.
- 7+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production, including deep hands-on experience with LLMs at scale.
- Demonstrated leadership in architecting complex AI systems, particularly agentic or multi-step LLM workflows.
- Deep expertise in transformer-based models, embeddings, retrieval systems, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks for LLM systems beyond single-turn prompts, including robustness testing and production monitoring.
- Strong systems thinking: ability to design for scalability, latency constraints, cost efficiency, security, and long-term maintainability.
- Extensive experience with modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face) and distributed/cloud-based infrastructure.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams as a senior individual contributor.
- A strong bias toward action — able to prototype rapidly while maintaining production rigor.

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 to take the time you need, when you need it
- Paid parental leave for all new parents welcoming a new child
- Retirement savings plan to help you plan for the future
- Remote work setup budget to help you create a productive home office
- Monthly wellness and communication stipend to keep you connected and balanced
- In-office meal program and commuter benefits provided for onsite employees

Compensation at Cresta:

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.

OTE Range: $230,000–$300,000 + Offers Equity

## About Cresta

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cresta is the generative AI platform for customer experience, unifying human and AI agents to drive measurable business outcomes for the world's largest enterprises.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series D, $125M raised in 2024)
- **Headquarters**: Sunnyvale, California, USA (with additional offices in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, London, Berlin, Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Tokyo, Taipei, Melbourne)
- **Founded**: 2017
- **Founders**: Zayd Enam, Sebastian Thrun, Tim Shi

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Generative AI for Customer Experience (CX) / Contact Center AI
- **Target customers**: Enterprise (Fortune 500), B2B; verticals include customer service, sales, collections
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Turn every conversation into a competitive advantage" by combining the best of human intelligence and AI.

## Products & Services
- **Cresta AI Agent**: Autonomous voice and digital agent that resolves customer conversations end-to-end (SaaS/AI agent).
- **Cresta Agent Assist**: Real-time AI guidance, suggestions, and knowledge for human agents during live conversations (SaaS).
- **Cresta Conversation Intelligence**: AI that analyzes 100% of conversations to surface insights, behaviors, and revenue opportunities (SaaS).
- **Cresta Knowledge Agent**: Proactive, real-time answers from enterprise knowledge bases delivered to agents (SaaS).
- **Cresta Quality Management**: Automated QA across 100% of contact center conversations (SaaS).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised $270M+ (as of 2026)
- **Notable Investors**: Sequoia, Greylock, a16z, Tiger Global, World Innovation Lab (WiL)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - 600+ employees across 10+ global hubs
  - Expanded into APAC and EMEA markets in 2025
  - Partnerships with TELUS Digital (June 2026) and New York Mets (June 2026)
  - Launched Conductor (AI agent development tool) in June 2026
  - Reported 20% higher revenue and 30pt NPS improvement for customers

## Competitive Advantages
- **Real-time transformer-based models** deployed at scale since 2018 (Intuit was first customer)
- **Patented conversational AI technology** (multiple patents secured)
- **Unified platform** that combines AI agents, human agent assist, and conversation intelligence
- **Human-centric AI approach** differentiating from pure automation players
- **Fortune 500 trust** and deep enterprise integrations

## Strategic Focus
- **Accelerate adoption of human-centric agentic AI** across global enterprises
- **Expand globally** with new hubs in APAC and EMEA
- **Continue product innovation** (e.g., Conductor for AI agent development, voice AI enhancements)
- **Deepen partnerships** with system integrators and telcos

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven culture**: "Mission is the boss" – decisions align with company goals, not hierarchy
- **Flexible work**: Hybrid model with many fully remote roles; offices in major cities worldwide
- **Global team**: 10+ hubs across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia
- **Perks & benefits**: Multiple medical/dental/vision plans, inclusive parental leave, generous time-off policy, workspace support, learning opportunities (hackathons, guest speakers)
- **Growth mindset**: Autonomy, high-impact roles, and continuous learning encouraged
- **Engineering culture**: Strong emphasis on AI/ML, real-time systems, and building at scale

## Sources
1. [Cresta Careers Page](https://cresta.com/careers)
2. [Cresta About Page](https://cresta.com/about-us)
3. [Cresta Official Website](https://cresta.com/)
4. [Cresta Greenhouse Jobs](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cresta)

## Other roles at Cresta

- [GTM Strategy & Operations Manager, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-strategy-operations-manager-emea-cresta-united-kingdom-kh6bwr8q9m2w) — United Kingdom
- [Sales Development Manager - West](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-manager-west-cresta-san-francisco-6nqhnp5jjqze) — San Francisco, CA
- [Sales Development Manager - East](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-manager-east-cresta-new-york-yezhdnz6q0cw) — New York, NY
- [Manager of Enterprise AI Success.](https://feeny.ai/job/manager-of-enterprise-ai-success-cresta-united-states-p8sdem3j2rcw) — United States
- [Growth Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-manager-cresta-united-states-d9tfe2sqmxx6) — United States
- [Special Projects, AI Agents Team](https://feeny.ai/job/special-projects-ai-agents-team-cresta-united-states-0n7e6sag3de7) — United States
- [Engagement Manager (Professional Services Sales)](https://feeny.ai/job/engagement-manager-professional-services-sales-cresta-united-states-5sqe3j0kc9vy) — United States
- [Deal Strategy & Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/deal-strategy-operations-manager-cresta-india-8nta6g90h3sf) — India
- [Deal Strategy & Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/deal-strategy-operations-manager-cresta-united-states-2p4dwx4cwyxn) — United States
- [Solutions Engineer, AI Agent](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-ai-agent-cresta-united-states-kj155ndjedek) — United States