Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Cresta is on a mission to turn every customer conversation into a competitive advantage by unlocking the true potential of the contact center. Our platform combines the best of AI and human intelligence to help contact centers discover customer insights and behavioral best practices, automate conversations and inefficient processes, and empower every team member to work smarter and faster. Born from the prestigious Stanford AI lab, Cresta's co-founder and chairman is Sebastian Thrun, the genius behind Google X, Waymo, Udacity, and more. Our leadership also includes CEO, Ping Wu, the co-founder of Google Contact Center AI and Vertex AI platform, and co-founder, Tim Shi, an early member of Open AI. Join us on this thrilling journey to revolutionize the workforce with AI. The future of work is here, and it's 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: Lead the design and development of Cresta’s next-generation AI Agents and Agentic Assist systems, defining system architecture and core modeling approaches. Architect intelligent, multi-step agent workflows that combine real-time guidance, knowledge retrieval, reasoning, summarization, and automated actions into cohesive production systems. Design, deploy, and optimize LLM-powered systems, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, and domain-adapted models. Improve reasoning, planning, and tool-use capabilities in real-world AI applications. Develop evaluation strategies for complex, non-deterministic systems, including offline benchmarking, online experimentation, and LLM-as-a-judge methodologies. Diagnose and mitigate real-world failure modes such as hallucinations, retrieval errors, tool misuse, prompt brittleness, and multi-step reasoning breakdowns. Define and measure quality metrics (e.g., accuracy, faithfulness, task completion, latency, cost, robustness) to improve system reliability and performance. Optimize AI systems for scalability, latency, security, and cost efficiency in production environments. Collaborate cross-functionally with product, frontend, and backend teams to integrate AI capabilities seamlessly into Cresta’s platform. Mentor engineers, contribute to technical strategy, and help shape the roadmap for Cresta’s AI systems. Qualifications We Value: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field; Master’s or Ph.D. preferred. 5–8+ years of industry experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production, including significant experience working with LLMs. Strong expertise in NLP, Generative AI, transformer architectures, embeddings, and retrieval systems. Proven experience designing and deploying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in enterprise environments. Experience building and evaluating complex agentic or multi-step LLM workflows. Strong knowledge of modern ML frameworks and tools (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face) and distributed/cloud-based infrastructure. Demonstrated ability to optimize real-time ML systems for performance, scalability, and reliability. Strong technical leadership skills, with the ability to influence cross-functional decisions and raise the engineering bar. 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. 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