Sesame
Staff Software Engineer, Backend Infrastructure
San Francisco · Staff+ · Contract
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 78 days ago
KubernetesTerraformMachine LearningPyTorchData EngineeringA/B TestingCommunication
About the role
- Our team brings together founders from Oculus and Ubiquity6, alongside proven leaders from Meta, Google, and Apple, with deep expertise spanning hardware and software.
- Join us in shaping a future where computers truly come alive.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain secure, maintainable, self-serve core infrastructure that engineering teams can rely on and operate independently
- Lead the architecture and evolution of a modern ML training infrastructure - scalable, reproducible, and built for rapid experimentation
- Build and operate a modern model serving architecture with a focus on reliability, cost efficiency, and low latency
- Lead and own the low-latency voice interface and audio processing pipeline - a technically demanding, performance-sensitive system at the core of Sesame's product
- Build developer tooling, server infrastructure, and data infrastructure that is high leverage and low maintenance - the kind that makes other engineers faster without creating new dependencies on you
- Lead technical direction within your domain, bring others along through clear communication and well-reasoned proposals, and raise the engineering bar across the team
- Proven track record of building and shipping services at scale, with all the operational complexity that comes with it
- Kubernetes - significant production experience building, operating, and scaling Kubernetes clusters
- 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.
Requirements
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in infrastructure, platform, or ML systems roles
- Hands-on reliability engineering experience - you have well-formed convictions about observability, monitoring, deployment systems, and loosely coupled architectures, and you've put them into practice at scale
- A default toward automation - you've consistently built efficiency gains through automation and have the track record to show it
Nice to have
- Infrastructure as Code at scale - significant IaC experience, preferably Terraform
- CloudFormation, Pulumi, or Kubernetes-based approaches also welcome.
- ML infrastructure - any combination of the following:
- PyTorch experience, especially model optimisation for serving
- ML training or serving experience in general
- Real-time communication systems - low-latency audio, video, or streaming infrastructure
- We'd love to hear about experience in any of these areas - we don't expect any one person to have all of them:
- Sesame is committed to a workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered.
Compensation
- 401 (k) max employer match: 3.5% of compensation
Benefits
- 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.
- Experience designing and shipping flexible domain models and APIs - you think carefully about boundaries, contracts, and long-term maintainability
This listing is sourced directly from Sesame's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.