Applied Data Scientist

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. We’ve assembled a world-class team of AI and ML experts, go-to-market leaders, and top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Sequoia, and former ATT CEO John Donovan. Our valued customers include brands like Intuit, Cox Communications, Hilton, and Carmax and we’ve been recognized by Forbes and Bain Consulting as one of the top private AI companies in the world. 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: 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 ... (truncated, view full listing at source)