Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Define and lead the technical vision for Cresta's next-generation Agentic AI systems
• ▹Architect scalable, production-grade LLM systems integrating reasoning, retrieval, planning, and tool use
• ▹Design multi-agent orchestration frameworks combining RAG, structured knowledge, and domain-adapted models
• ▹Establish best practices for robust, reliable, cost-efficient LLM-powered systems
• ▹Own evaluation strategy: offline benchmarking, online experimentation, LLM-as-a-judge methodologies
• ▹Proactively identify and mitigate agent failure modes (hallucinations, tool misuse, retrieval errors, context drift)
• ▹Define measurable quality standards (accuracy, faithfulness, task completion, latency, cost)
• ▹Influence cross-team architecture decisions across ML, backend, and product engineering
• ▹Mentor senior engineers, raise the technical bar, and shape long-term AI strategy

Requirements

• ▹Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related field; Master's or Ph.D. strongly preferred
• ▹7+ years building and deploying ML systems in production, with deep hands-on LLM experience at scale
• ▹Demonstrated leadership architecting complex AI systems, particularly agentic or multi-step LLM workflows
• ▹Deep expertise in transformer-based models, embeddings, retrieval systems, and RAG pipelines
• ▹Experience designing evaluation frameworks for LLM systems, including robustness testing and production monitoring
• ▹Strong systems thinking: scalability, latency, cost efficiency, security, and maintainability
• ▹Extensive experience with modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face) and distributed/cloud infrastructure
• ▹Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams as a senior individual contributor

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹OTE range: $230,000–$300,000
• ▹Equity
• ▹Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family
• ▹Flexible PTO
• ▹Paid parental leave
• ▹Retirement savings plan
• ▹Remote work setup budget
• ▹Monthly wellness and communication stipend

About the company

Born from the Stanford AI Lab, Cresta builds a unified AI platform combining conversational AI agents, real-time agent augmentation, and conversation intelligence for customers like United Airlines, Cox Communications, and Marriott; it has raised over $270M from a16z, Greylock, and Sequoia.