---
title: 'Software Engineer - Backend at Sesame'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-backend-sesame-san-francisco-m8vjteeqpd43'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Software Engineer - Backend at Sesame

- **Company:** Sesame
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $175k–$280k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sesame/04780842-fd58-41d9-87a1-f65e818eebab/application

**Skills:** Programming, Distributed Systems, Database Engineering, REST, WebSockets, gRPC, HTTP, Kubernetes, Relational Databases, NoSQL, Caching, Asynchronous Processing, Real-time Systems, Software Design, CRDTs, Python, GCP, Payments Systems, Search Infrastructure, Real-time Media

> Design and build scalable backend systems, distributed architectures, and APIs for a human-like AI product. The role involves solving complex technical problems in real-time streaming, machine learning inference, and low-latency networking while ensuring system reliability and security.

## Job description

## 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 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.

## About the Role

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.

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.

Required Qualifications:

- 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.

Preferred Qualifications: We'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 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.

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 careers@sesame.com for assistance.

Full-time Employee 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

Benefits do not apply to contingent/contract workers.

## About Sesame

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sesame is building lifelike, conversational AI agents integrated into lightweight eyewear, aiming to bring ambient intelligence to daily life.
- **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage, backed by prominent venture firms)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Brendan Iribe, Ankit Kumar, Ryan Brown, Angela Gayles, Nate Mitchell

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence / Voice assistants / Consumer electronics
- **Target customers**: Consumer (B2C) – individuals seeking hands-free, intelligent personal agents integrated into everyday eyewear
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Bringing the computer to life” – creating a personal companion that understands you, with natural conversation and lightweight, all-day wearable hardware.

## Products & Services
- **Sesame Personal Agents**: Software-based conversational AI agents capable of natural dialogue, personality modeling, and multimodal interaction (voice, gesture). Currently in development; initial hardware (eyewear) targeted for 2027.
- **Sesame Eyewear**: Lightweight, all-day comfortable glasses with high-quality audio and hands-free agent access. Coming 2027.
- **Research Platform**: In-house deep learning research covering speech generation, personality modeling, multimodality, and scaled training infrastructure.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available. Unconfirmed reports suggest a potential fundraising round of ~$200 M (source: Techmeme via LinkedIn snippet). The company has not officially disclosed its valuation.
- **Key Metric**: Total employees ~70 (as of mid-2026), with +5.8 % monthly headcount growth.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Backed by a16z, Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, plus a collection of founders and investors.
- **Growth Signals**: 55 total employees on BuiltIn (likely older data); 63 active job postings (+14.5 % monthly trend); monthly LinkedIn follower growth of +3.8 % (20,969 followers). Talent sources include Meta, Apple, Google, DeepMind, and Microsoft.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Interdisciplinary approach**: Tightly integrated hardware, software, and ML teams (hardware engineers, ML researchers, product designers) working on a unified product vision.
- **Founding team pedigree**: Led by Oculus VR veterans (Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell) and experienced AI/ML innovators, giving deep expertise in both consumer hardware and conversational AI.
- **Research depth**: Active push in speech generation, personality modeling, and multimodality, with scaled GPU infrastructure for training.

## Strategic Focus
- **Near-term**: Ship the first generation of personal agent software and finalize the eyewear device for a 2027 launch. Continue advancing foundational ML research.
- **Long-term**: Build a new category of ambient, always-available AI companions that replace traditional screen-based interaction.
- **Growth areas**: Expanding engineering team rapidly (63 open roles), especially in ML, embedded systems, iOS/Android, supply chain, and hardware.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Small, focused, interdisciplinary team with a clear vision. Emphasis on tight collaboration between research, product, and hardware. Described as “artists, makers, and engineers.”
- **Work environment**: In-office for most roles (San Francisco, Bellevue, New York). Roles are listed as “In-Office” (not remote/hybrid). Offices in SF, Bellevue, NY.
- **Perks & engineering culture**: Not explicitly detailed, but the company invests heavily in infrastructure (GPU clusters) and research. Strong engineering focus with roles spanning embedded ML, OS architecture, and developer infrastructure.
- **Notable**: Opportunities to work on cutting-edge voice AI and physical product design from the ground up.

## Sources
1. [sesame.com](https://www.sesame.com/) – Company overview and product vision
2. [sesame.com/team](https://www.sesame.com/team) – Leadership, investors, team description
3. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/sesame-sesamecom) – Founded year, HQ, employee count, office policy
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sesameai) – Employee count, growth, talent sources, funding rumor
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sesame) – Open positions and location details

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