Backend Engineer (AI)

Location: On-site in San Francisco, Bellevue, or New York

Salary: $175K–$280K per year

Company

Sesame is developing a new kind of computer with lifelike voice agents that can see, hear, and collaborate naturally with people.

What you will do

• Design and build backend systems and services powering voice-agent products, including data models, APIs, and distributed systems.
• Own the full service lifecycle from schema design and implementation through deployment, performance tuning, and on-call operations.
• Build frameworks and libraries that improve software quality and developer productivity.
• Choose and operate relational and non-relational data stores, queues, caches, and search indexes.
• Architect ML-driven systems such as real-time audio pipelines, agentic orchestration, and stateful conversation services.
• Identify bottlenecks and improve cost, throughput, latency, reliability, and developer efficiency.

Requirements

• Expert-level programming ability in at least one language and strong software design skills.
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals, including failure modes, consistency tradeoffs, and scaling strategies.
• Production experience with scalable architectures, caching, sharded data stores, asynchronous processing, or shared-nothing services.
• Strong database engineering skills, including schema design, query tuning, and relational and non-relational data modeling.
• Experience with REST, WebSockets, gRPC, HTTP semantics, Kubernetes deployment, and service reliability engineering.
• Ability to work on-site in San Francisco, Bellevue, or New York.

Nice to have

• Experience with payments, search and relevance, or real-time media systems.
• Deep Python expertise.
• Experience building on GCP.
• Deep interest in software design, CRDTs, real-time systems, database internals, or related areas.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental benefits for employees and dependents.
• 401(k) employer match up to 3.5% of compensation.
• Unlimited paid time off and sick time.
• Medical FSA matching up to $1,650 per year and access to an Employee Assistance Program.
• Competitive stock options and reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.