Backend Engineer - Real-Time AI Systems

Sesame; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Health, vision, dental benefits

Unlimited PTO

FSA

Stock options

On-site amenities

Job summary

Sesame is building a new kind of computer with voice agents and real-time services. Backend engineers design and own the systems that power Sesame's product—data models, APIs, and distributed services—while focusing on scalability, reliability, and security to deliver a high-quality consumer experience.

Ideal candidates have strong programming skills, solid distributed systems fundamentals, database expertise, and hands-on Kubernetes experience.

Qualifications

• Strong programmer with expert-level knowledge in at least one language.
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals and scalability thinking.
• Experience designing and building systems at real scale (caching, sharding, async pipelines).
• Strong database engineering skills across relational and NoSQL stores.
• Familiar with REST, WebSockets, gRPC, HTTP; understands service communication.
• Kubernetes deployment experience; self-sufficient.
• Reliability engineering with on-call experience.
• Deep, specialty interest in area of software.

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.

Skills

Strong programmer

Distributed systems

System design

Database engineering

APIs & protocols

Reliability engineering

Deep software interest

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Sesame is building a new kind of computer with voice agents and real-time services. Backend engineers design and own the systems that power Sesame's product—data models, APIs, and distributed services—while focusing on scalability, reliability, and security to deliver a high-quality consumer experience.

Ideal candidates have strong programming skills, solid distributed systems fundamentals, database expertise, and hands-on Kubernetes experience.