Senior Software Engineer - Backend Platform

About Cresta

Cresta harnesses artificial intelligence to revolutionize customer experiences by transforming every conversation into a competitive asset. Their unified AI platform merges conversational AI agents, real-time support for human agents, and advanced conversation analytics to boost revenue and operational efficiency across multiple channels. Major corporations such as United Airlines, Cox Communications, and Marriott rely on Cresta daily for superior customer engagement.

Originating from the Stanford AI Lab, Cresta has raised over $270 million from top-tier investors including a16z, Greylock, and Sequoia. The leadership team features some of the most prominent AI experts, including CEO Ping Wu, formerly of Google's Contact Center AI and Vertex AI initiatives. Cresta is shaping the future of AI-driven customer interactions worldwide.

Role Overview

The Core Platform team at Cresta serves as the foundational backend supporting all product lines. The mission is to develop a resilient, secure, scalable, and versatile infrastructure that enables innovation, meets enterprise standards, and maintains cost efficiency. Key elements include backend agent assist services and scalable authentication solutions adhering to industry best practices.

This position focuses on developing backend systems to facilitate effective customer integrations by:

• Implementing agent assist integration for chat and email in collaboration with frontend, machine learning, infrastructure, and other backend teams.
• Enhancing backend agent assist capabilities in response to client needs and feature requests.
• Diagnosing and resolving issues that impede integrations, affect user experiences, or degrade system performance.
• Collaborating with the authentication and security team to fulfill Cresta's diverse authentication and security requirements for both internal and external workflows.

Why This Role is Unique

• Work on enterprise-level integrations with leading CCaaS platforms and customer infrastructures.
• Contribute to specialized authentication systems authenticating diverse entities such as users, service accounts, virtual agents, and cloud services.
• Partner closely with the frontend platform team to architect agent assist solutions for multiple communication channels and assist in their deployment at client sites.

Responsibilities

• Help establish Cresta as a top-tier organization by delivering exceptional product features.
• Design and maintain systems responsible for managing real-time conversation states, session lifecycles, and context propagation.
• Lead substantial portions of the agent assist integration efforts for chat and email channels, as well as contributions to the authentication engineering team.
• Collaborate across product and engineering departments to evolve the Cresta platform and meet emerging product needs.
• Engage directly with customers to gather requirements, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and manage customer-facing deliverables.
• Adhere to and promote high engineering standards and best practices throughout development and operations.
• Assume technical ownership of significant segments of Cresta’s authentication infrastructure.
• Ensure systems deliver high availability, minimal latency, and thorough observability in real-time conversation handling.
• Implement authentication, authorization, regulatory compliance, and enterprise security best practices across integrations.
• Drive enhancements in system reliability, scalability, and performance under high interaction loads in production environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Over 5 years of experience designing and deploying scalable backend systems in production settings.
• Proven proficiency in developing and maintaining robust APIs using REST or gRPC.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and architectures supporting real-time communications.
• Experience integrating with third-party enterprise platforms and APIs.
• Familiarity with CCaaS platforms or contact center technologies is advantageous.
• Knowledge of AI Agents, virtual assistants, or large language model based applications is a plus.
• Comfort working with containerization tools like Kubernetes and Docker.
• Hands-on experience with cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure.
• Strong grasp of enterprise-level system reliability, observability, and security principles.
• Development experience with authentication mechanisms is desirable.

Benefits and Perks

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance plans suitable for employees and their families.
• Paid parental leave to support employees and their families.
• Monthly allowance dedicated to health and wellness expenses.
• Work-from-home office expense stipend to facilitate effective remote work.
• Lunch reimbursement available for on-site employees.
• Three weeks of paid time off for Canadian employees.

Additional Information

Compensation comprises a base salary, equity participation, and assorted benefits. Base salaries vary depending on experience, skills, geographical location, and applicable local regulatory requirements. Recruitment is ongoing for this role in both the United States and Canada.

Candidates should be cautious about recruitment scams: all official communication will originate from the @cresta.ai email domain. Any outreach via other domains should be treated as suspicious. In case of doubts, candidates may verify authenticity through official channels.