Sesame

Software Engineer - Backend

San Francisco · Contract

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 89 days ago

PythonDistributed SystemsNoSQLGCPRESTgRPCWebSocketsMachine LearningCommunication

About the role

Backend engineering at Sesame is a domain rich with challenging technical problems: real-time streaming audio pipelines, resilient and low-latency networking, complex machine learning inference, scalable agentic workflows, and more.
At the centre of all of this: how should we think about quality, craft, security, and reliability engineering when the system under test is a human-like personality?
On the backend engineering team, your job is to tackle challenges like these directly, all while providing a reliable, secure, high quality consumer experience for a growing base of users.

Design and build the backend systems and services that power Sesame's product. You own the data models, the APIs, and the distributed systems that everything else depends on
Build and evolve the frameworks and libraries that other engineers build on. You care about good software design and it shows in the interfaces you create
Own the full lifecycle of your services: schema design, implementation, deployment, performance tuning, and on-call
Own the architecture of systems where ML models are a critical component but not the whole story. Real-time audio pipelines, agentic orchestration, stateful conversation systems - these are complex, ML-driven machines that require careful architecture
You're a strong programmer first. You're expert-level in at least one language and you write clean, well-designed code that other engineers can build on
You've designed and built systems that handle real scale. Caching layers, sharded data stores, async processing pipelines, shared-nothing service architectures - you've worked with these patterns in production environments, not just theoretically
Design and build the backend systems and services that power Sesame's product.
Sesame believes in a future where computers are lifelike - with the ability to see, hear, and collaborate with us in ways that feel natural and human.

You can think through system models, failure modes, consistency tradeoffs, and scaling strategies independently
Proven reliability engineering instincts.
You have a genuine deep interest in some area of software.

We'd love to hear about experience in any of these areas - but we don't expect any one person to have all of them:
Hands-on experience in one or more of these domains:
Payments - billing systems, transaction processing, ledgers, financial data integrity
Real-time media - streaming, low-latency audio/video, real-time communication systems
Deep Python expertise.
You know how to write Python that's maintainable, performant, and scalable
Sesame is committed to a workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered.
We welcome all qualified applicants, embracing diversity in race, gender, identity, orientation, ability, and more.

Identify performance bottlenecks and fix them. Think about cost, throughput, and latency as first-class concerns

100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental benefits for you and your dependents
Unlimited PTO and sick time
Flexible spending account with employer matching up to $1,650/year (medical FSA)
Opportunity to share in the company's success with competitive stock options
Benefits do not apply to contingent/contract workers.
With this vision, we're designing a new kind of computer, focused on making voice agents part of our daily lives.

This listing is sourced directly from Sesame's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.