Lead Engineer, Real-Time Voice AI Systems

Jobicy; United States; Remote; USD 205,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Flexible PTO

Parental leave

Retirement plan

Remote work setup budget

Wellness allowance

Onsite meals

Job summary

Cresta is looking for a Lead Engineer, AI Agent Voice Experience to advance our next-generation voice systems for contact centers. You'll work where speech, language, and live production meet, shaping models and systems that listen, understand, and respond with empathy in real-time conversations.

You will collaborate with researchers, product managers, and engineers to deploy ML workflows—from ASR to TTS and speech-to-speech—delivering measurable business impact across customer interactions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field.
• Master's or Ph.D. preferred.
• 5+ years of experience building, evaluating, and deploying machine learning systems in production.
• Demonstrated experience in leading fast-moving, highly technical teams.
• Strong communication skills with cross-functional influence.
• Distinctive technical vision for the future of voice AI.
• Solid understanding of transformer-based models, embeddings, retrieval systems, and large-scale training or inference workflows.
• Experience designing and deploying real-time ML systems with latency, scalability, and reliability requirements.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning systems that power real-time voice experiences, including speech to text turn detection, text to speech, speech to speech, reasoning and structured insight generation.
• Improve the quality of voice AI systems through error analysis, data curation, metric design, benchmarking, and iterative model improvement, with a strong focus on real-world performance.
• Build evaluation frameworks for complex voice and agentic systems, measuring metrics such as accuracy, robustness, latency, faithfulness, naturalness, professionalism, task completion, and cost.
• Diagnose and mitigate failure modes across the voice stack, including transcription errors, hallucinations, tool misuse, prompt brittleness, context drift, and multi-step reasoning breakdowns.
• Design, implement, and optimize low-latency ML systems that deliver delightful caller experience (e.g., backchanneling, focusing on foreground speaker, interpreting caller’s emotions, responding with empathy).
• Partner with platform and backend engineers to productionize real-time inference, streaming pipelines, quality monitoring, and continuous model iteration.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, frontend, and backend teams to integrate voice intelligence seamlessly into Cresta's platform.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to technical strategy, and help shape the roadmap for Cresta's voice AI systems.

Skills

Leadership experience

Strong communication

Technical vision

Real-time ML systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Math/ML/AI

Master's or PhD preferred

Job description

Cresta is looking for a Lead Engineer, AI Agent Voice Experience to advance our next-generation voice systems for contact centers. You'll work where speech, language, and live production meet, shaping models and systems that listen, understand, and respond with empathy in real-time conversations.

You will collaborate with researchers, product managers, and engineers to deploy ML workflows—from ASR to TTS and speech-to-speech—delivering measurable business impact across customer interactions.