Backend Software Engineer

Sesame • San Francisco, CA

10d

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals. You can think through system models, failure modes, consistency tradeoffs, and scaling strategies independently
• 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
• Strong database engineering skills. You've built complex schemas, tuned queries, and made hard choices about data modeling across relational and non-relational stores
• Comfortable with protocols and networking at the application level: REST, WebSockets, gRPC, HTTP semantics. You understand how services talk to each other and you make good choices about it
• You deploy and run services on Kubernetes. You're self-sufficient here, but you're not the person setting up the cluster
• Proven reliability engineering instincts. You've been on challenging on-call rotations and you came out of them with ideas for how to make things better
• You 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 to

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience in one or more of these domains: Payments — billing systems, transaction processing, ledgers, financial data integrity
• Search and relevance — building and tuning search infrastructure, ranking, indexing pipelines
• 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
• Experience building on GCP

Responsibilities

• 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
• Write software that's built to last. You're not prototyping; you're solving hard problems that require careful thinking about scalability, reliability, and correctness
• 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
• Work across the data layer, choosing and operating the right stores for the job: relational databases, NoSQL, queues, caches, search indexes
• Identify performance bottlenecks and fix them. Think about cost, throughput, and latency as first-class concerns
• 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
• Spot 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 productionize

Benefits

• 401 (k) max employer match: 3.5% of compensation
• 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)
• Guardian Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Opportunity to share in the company's success with competitive stock options

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed