Backend Infrastructure Engineer

About Sesame

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. With this vision, we're designing a new kind of computer, focused on making voice companions 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.

About the Role

Backend Infrastructure at Sesame is a Software Engineering role focused on the bottom half of the stack. In this role, you will specifically be focused on building high-leverage infrastructure, services, and tooling that is cross-cutting rather than vertical. This role will bring you into contact with scalability and architectural challenges across multiple domains: agentic workflows, speech understanding and synthesis, IoT, large-scale training, and scalable low-latency inference. If you’re motivated by the idea of building a hyper-efficient, scalable, productive, and reliable engineering system through a combination of tooling, services, libraries, and infrastructure, this team is for you.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and build cross-cutting infrastructure to power serving, training, and the application layer at Sesame.

• Create compounding productivity improvements for engineers at Sesame by automating everything and building amazing tools.

• Ship software that makes it easy for product and machine learning engineers to build scalable, reliable systems that are secure by default.

• Your work spans provider, service, security, and developer infrastructure, plus the design and implementation of core services and libraries.

Required Qualifications:

• Experience solving hard problems with Kubernetes.

• You enjoy using cloud or open source infrastructure to solve hard problems when the situation calls for it.

• You are an excellent programmer and software engineer first; you use open source and cloud infrastructure to leverage in system design.

• Passionate about automation, including automating repetitive tasks, eliminating toil, building self-serve frameworks, and finding ways to do more with less; passionate about making other developers more productive.

• Excited about using AI to automate and build tools that weren’t even possible one year ago.

• Obsessed with system uptime, observability, and implementing security best practices at the infrastructure level.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Security engineering experience: You’ve been instrumental in defining security policy or controls, implementing or adopting proactive or defensive tooling, etc.

• Scalable, real-time communication: building and shipping systems that stream and process audio/video in real time and at scale.

• Database design, scaling, and database performance expertise.

• Significant experience working with and building systems on GCP.

• Deep Python expertise; you know how to build maintainable, high-performance, and scalable tooling and serving systems using Python.

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. We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities—contact [email protected] for assistance.

Full-time Employee Benefits: 

• 401k matching

• 100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental benefits 

• Unlimited PTO and sick time 

• Flexible spending account matching (medical FSA) 

Benefits do not apply to contingent/contract workers.