Software Engineer

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.

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.