Applied Data Scientist

Cresta unlocks the true potential of the customer experience, turning every conversation into a competitive advantage. Cresta’s unified AI platform combines conversational AI agents, real-time human agent augmentation, and comprehensive conversation intelligence to drive revenue and efficiency gains across every channel. The world’s leading companies, including United Airlines, Cox Communications, and Marriott, use Cresta to power world-class customer experiences every day. 

Born from the Stanford AI Lab, Cresta has raised more than $270 million from the world’s leading investors, including a16z, Greylock, and Sequoia. Cresta’s leadership includes some of the leading minds in AI today. Our CEO, Ping Wu, founded and led Google's Contact Center AI and Vertex AI platforms before joining Cresta to build the future of AI-driven customer experiences.

Over the next few years, AI is going to redefine how people all over the world interact with businesses every day. Come build that future at Cresta.

About the Role:

As an Applied Data Scientist on our Insights team, you will help pioneer the next generation of Cresta features that power how enterprises understand and optimize every customer interaction. You’ll partner directly with Product Managers, Machine Learning Engineers, other Data Scientists, and a set of strategic design-partner customers to solve their biggest challenges.

If you love working from first principles in a rapid iteration loop with customers - this is your chance to have an outsized impact on the customer experience industry.

What You’ll Do:

• Co-develop new capabilities with a small number of high-impact enterprise customers along with our product, engineering, and design teams; using their real workflows and constraints as your testbed
• Communicate effectively across all levels of the organization
• Plan and run short, focused design-partner engagements (days to weeks) where you ship early versions, collect structured feedback, and iterate quickly
• Generalize learnings from each design partner into reusable, productized capabilities rather than one-off bespoke models
• Partner with domain experts to curate high-quality eval guidelines and datasets for domains such as CSAT prediction and outcome prediction (across both human<>human and human<>AI interactions)
• Use the best tools + models for the job (simple and interpretable where it matters, sophisticated where it can drive outsized value
• Write clear specs and experiment reports that make tradeoffs and assumptions explicit
• Stay close to the research frontier in ML/AI, LLMs, and evals, translating promising ideas into pragmatic, shippable improvements
• Where applicable, help translate your solutions into publications, whitepapers, technical blogs, etc.

What We’re Looking For:

• 3+ years building and shipping models for real-world business applications, ideally in NLP and LLM-based systems
• Strong proficiency in Python and standard ML / data tooling (e.g., SQL, data pipelines, experiment frameworks)
• World-class first principles thinking and ML intuition
• Ability to turn ambiguous product asks into crisp problem statements, eval specs, metrics, and hypotheses
• Experience working directly with customers or internal stakeholders to understand constraints, explain tradeoffs, and iterate on solutions
• Comfort working with design-partner style engagements where requirements evolve rapidly and you’re expected to co-create the solution
• Track record of building evaluation suites that go beyond single scalar metrics to capture reliability, safety, and qualitative user experience
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to clearly explain complex technical work to both engineers and non-technical partners

Bonus Points:

• Experience building ML or analytics systems for customer experience, contact centers, or enterprise SaaS
• Prior work on analytics / insights products (e.g., deep research systems, anomaly detection, customer experience analytics, voice of customer) 
• Published work at ML / NLP conferences

Perks & Benefits:

We offer a comprehensive and people-first benefits package to support you at work and in life:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with plans to fit you and your family
• Flexible PTO to take the time you need, when you need it
• Paid parental leave for all new parents welcoming a new child
• Retirement savings plan to help you plan for the future
• Remote work setup budget to help you create a productive home office
• Monthly wellness and communication stipend to keep you connected and balanced
• In-office meal program and commuter benefits provided for onsite employees

Compensation at Cresta 

Cresta’s approach to compensation is simple: recognize impact, reward excellence, and invest in our people. We offer competitive, location-based pay that reflects the market and what each individual brings to the table.

The posted base salary range represents what we expect to pay for this role in a given location. Final offers are shaped by factors like experience, skills, education, and geography. In addition to base pay, total compensation includes equity and a comprehensive benefits package for you and your family.

Salary Range: $150,000–$200,000 & Offers Equity

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]