Software Engineer - Backend

Backend Engineering Role At SesameSesame 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. With this vision, we're designing a new kind of computer, focused on making voice agents part of our daily lives. 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.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. Our work ranges from systems programming to thorny distributed systems design to cutting-edge applied AI. 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.ResponsibilitiesDesign 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 onWrite software that's built to last. You're not prototyping; you're solving hard problems that require careful thinking about scalability, reliability, and correctnessBuild and evolve the frameworks and libraries that other engineers build on. You care about good software design and it shows in the interfaces you createOwn the full lifecycle of your services: schema design, implementation, deployment, performance tuning, and on-callWork across the data layer, choosing and operating the right stores for the job: relational databases, NoSQL, queues, caches, search indexesIdentify performance bottlenecks and fix them. Think about cost, throughput, and latency as first-class concernsOwn 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 architectureSpot opportunities to improve developer efficiency within your area. You might prototype a tool or workflow improvement, then hand it off to the infra team to productionizeRequired QualificationsYou'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 onSolid distributed systems fundamentals. You can think through system models, failure modes, consistency tradeoffs, and scaling strategies independentlyYou'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 theoreticallyStrong database engineering skills. You've built complex schemas, tuned queries, and made hard choices about data modeling across relational and non-relational storesComfortable with protocols and networking at the application level: REST, WebSockets, gRPC, semantics. You understand how services talk to each other and you make good choices about itYou deploy and run services on Kubernetes. You're self-sufficient here, but you're not the person setting up the clusterProven reliability engineering instincts. You've been on challenging on-call rotations and you came out of them with ideas for how to make things betterYou have a genuine deep interest in some area of software. Maybe it's software design, CRDTs, real-time systems, database internals, or something else entirely. You go deeper than the job requires because you want toPreferred QualificationsWe'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 integritySearch and relevance — building and tuning search infrastructure, ranking, indexing pipelinesReal-time media — streaming, low-latency audio/video, real-time communication systemsDeep Python expertise. You know how to write Python that's maintainable, performant, and scalableExperience building on GCPSesame 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. We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. Contact View email address on click.appcast.io for assistance.Full-time Employee Benefits:401 (k) max employer match: 3.5% of compensation100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental benefits for you and your dependentsUnlimited PTO and sick timeFlexible spending account with employer matching up to $1,650/year (medical FSA)Guardian Employee Assistance Program (EAP)Opportunity to share in the company's success with competitive stock optionsBenefits do not apply to contingent/contract workers.