Staff Software Engineer, Backend (AI Agent Integrations)

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: 

Cresta’s AI Agent team is building enterprise-grade AI Agents that can operate inside real-world contact center environments. A critical part of that mission is enabling our AI Agents to seamlessly integrate with customers’ CCaaS platforms (Contact Center as a Service), including voice and digital channels — and to smoothly transition conversations between AI and human agents when needed.

This team is focused on building the backend systems that allow our AI Agents to:

• Integrate deeply with leading CCaaS platforms
• Participate in live customer conversations across voice and chat
• Maintain full conversation state and context
• Perform real-time actions within the CCaaS ecosystem
• Seamlessly hand off conversations to human agents — without losing context, history, or workflow state
• Support human agents with AI assistance after transfer

We are looking for strong backend engineers who want to work at the intersection of distributed systems, real-time communication, enterprise integrations, and AI Agent orchestration.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will lead the architecture and technical direction of Cresta’s AI Agent integration platform. You will define how our AI Agents connect to, operate within, and scale across complex enterprise ecosystems.

Why This Role Is Unique: 

• AI + Real-Time Systems: Work on infrastructure that enables AI Agents to participate in live conversations at scale.
• Enterprise-Grade Integrations: Design robust integrations with major CCaaS platforms and customer systems.
• Human-AI Collaboration: Build the systems that make AI-to-human handoff seamless, contextual, and reliable.
• High-Impact Engineering: This is a highly visible, high-impact role shaping the backbone of how AI Agents operate in mission-critical customer environments.

If you’re a strong backend engineer who wants to apply your expertise to real-world AI systems operating inside complex enterprise ecosystems, this role offers that opportunity.

Responsibilities: 

• Lead the architecture and evolution of Cresta’s AI Agent integration framework across CCaaS platforms.
• Design scalable, extensible backend systems that manage real-time conversation state, session lifecycle, and context propagation.
• Establish architectural patterns for AI-to-human handoff that ensure durability, reliability, and seamless customer experience.
• Define integration strategies for voice, chat, messaging, routing, and agent desktop APIs across enterprise platforms.
• Drive system design for high availability, low latency, and fault tolerance in real-time environments.
• Set standards for observability, monitoring, incident response, and operational excellence.
• Partner closely with ML engineers to operationalize AI Agent capabilities into production-grade systems.
• Influence technical roadmap and prioritization in collaboration with engineering leadership.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the bar for backend engineering excellence across the organization.
• Lead complex cross-team technical initiatives from design through production rollout.

Qualifications We Value: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 8+ years of experience building scalable backend systems in production environments.
• Demonstrated experience leading architecture for large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in API design (REST, gRPC) and service-oriented architectures.
• Strong understanding of real-time communication systems and low-latency system design.
• Experience designing integrations with third-party enterprise platforms and APIs.
• Proven track record of driving technical direction across teams.
• Experience with containerized environments (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Strong expertise in reliability engineering, observability, and enterprise-grade security.
• Experience with CCaaS platforms, contact center systems, or real-time communications is highly valued.
• Familiarity with AI Agents, LLM-based systems, or AI orchestration platforms is a strong plus.

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.

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.  If you are uncertain whether you have been contacted by an official Cresta employee, reach out to [email protected]