Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Cresta provides a unified AI platform that combines conversational AI agents, real-time human agent augmentation, and conversation intelligence to improve customer experiences. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the architecture and evolution of scalable backend systems supporting enterprise AI agents, mentor engineers, and drive technical strategy and production excellence.

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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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