Applied Data Scientist

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