---
title: 'Staff Software Engineer, Backend at Cresta'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-backend-cresta-canada-vdpx45btm2jb'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Staff Software Engineer, Backend at Cresta

- **Company:** Cresta
- **Location:** Canada
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-06-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cresta/jobs/5248021008

## 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:

We're seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of our backend systems that power Cresta's AI platform. You'll architect scalable, distributed systems that enable enterprise AI agents to deliver exceptional customer experiences through voice and digital channels. This role offers the opportunity to shape technical strategy, mentor engineers, and build production systems at the intersection of AI and enterprise software.

This is a generic backend engineering hire. Team matching will be conducted during the later stages of the hiring process based on your interests, experience, and team needs. You'll have the opportunity to explore different team areas and find the best fit for your skills and career goals.

Key Responsibilities:

- Architecture & Leadership: Lead the architecture and evolution of large-scale distributed backend systems, driving cross-team technical initiatives from design through production
- Scalable Systems Design: Build high-performance, fault-tolerant backend services supporting real-time AI agents, conversation intelligence, and enterprise integrations
- AI/ML Collaboration: Partner with ML engineers to operationalize AI capabilities, building the runtime infrastructure and orchestration systems that power AI agents at scale
- Data & Storage Solutions: Design and optimize data storage and retrieval systems for real-time analytics and insights
- Production Excellence: Drive continuous improvements in system performance, cost efficiency, and scalability to handle
- high-volume production workloads
- Technical Mentorship: Mentor senior engineers, influence technical roadmap, and raise the bar for engineering quality across teams

Required Qualifications:

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
- 8+ years building scalable backend systems in production environments
- Proven experience leading large-scale distributed system architecture with deep understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, state management, and concurrency
- Strong proficiency in at least one major programming language (Python, Go, Java, C++, or similar)
- Strong API design expertise (REST, gRPC) and service-oriented architectures
- Experience with database design and optimization across SQL and NoSQL systems
- Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)
- Cloud platform expertise (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with strong security knowledge
- Experience building developer-facing tooling (CLIs, SDKs, testing frameworks)
- Strong expertise in system reliability, observability, monitoring, and production ownership (including on-call)
- Excellent communication skills for technical decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship
- High standards for code quality, testing, and engineering best practices

Preferred Qualifications:

- Effective use of AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, etc.) to significantly boost development productivity
- Deep understanding of real-time communication systems, low-latency design, and high-availability architectures
- Proven track record with third-party enterprise platform integrations
- Experience with Temporal workflow orchestration platform
- Hands-on experience with Postgres, ClickHouse, and Elasticsearch
- Experience with Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms or contact center systems
- Familiarity with AI Agents, LLM-based systems, or AI orchestration platforms
- Real-time voice or streaming media systems background
- LLM integration experience (streaming inference, prompt orchestration, RAG)
- Infrastructure-as-code and GitOps workflows

Perks & Benefits:

- We offer Cresta employees a variety of medical, dental, and vision plans, designed to fit you and your family’s needs
- Paid parental leave to support you and your family
- Monthly Health & Wellness allowance
- Work from home office stipend to help you succeed in a remote environment
- Lunch reimbursement for in-office employees
- PTO: 3 weeks in Canada

Compensation for this position includes a base salary, equity, and a variety of benefits. Actual base salaries will be based on candidate-specific factors, including experience, skillset, and location, and local minimum pay requirements as applicable. We are actively hiring for this role in the US and Canada. Your recruiter can provide further details. Our use of AI in recruiting: We may use AI tools in our recruiting process, which require human review and oversight. If you have questions about our use of AI or wish to opt out, please contact recruiting@cresta.ai (if you are opting out, please use the subject ‘Opt-Out’ in your email).

Recording & AI transcription: We do not authorize candidates to record or use AI transcription of any interview by phone, notetaker app, AI glasses, or other device. Candidates may request an exception or accommodation for review during the interview process as needed.

Recruiting impersonation scams: We have noticed a rise in recruiting impersonations across the industry, where scammers attempt to access candidates' personal and financial information through fake interviews and offers. All Cresta recruiting email communications will always come from the @cresta.ai domain. Any outreach claiming to be from Cresta via other sources should be ignored.

## 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)

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