Research Engineer

Sesame; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) max employer match

100% employer-paid health benefits

Unlimited PTO and sick time

Flexible spending account

Guardian Employee Assistance Program

Competitive stock options

Job summary

Sesame, located in San Francisco, is seeking a skilled Machine Learning Engineer to design and implement evaluation pipelines for their innovative voice models. Candidates should possess expert-level skills in PyTorch and a solid background in machine learning engineering. The role emphasizes rapid prototyping and deployment, requiring a hands-on approach to model training and monitoring.

Full-time employees enjoy comprehensive benefits including 401(k) matching, fully covered health insurance, unlimited PTO, and competitive stock options. Sesame fosters a work environment of diversity and inclusivity, welcoming all qualified applicants.

Qualifications

• Expert-level experience with PyTorch is a must.
• Proven record in software engineering with a focus on machine learning.
• Hands-on involvement in training large and complex models.

Responsibilities

• Own evaluation pipelines, automate offline and live evaluations.
• Create tooling for dataset curation and discovery.
• Prototype, train, and deploy state-of-the-art models.

Skills

Expert-level PyTorch

Production code development

Training large language models

Evaluation metrics design

ML lifecycle expertise

Project delivery under shifting requirements

Technical direction and consensus building

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.

Responsibilities

• Own evaluation pipelines — design, build, and automate offline and live evals that keep our speech and multimodal models honest in production.
• Harness the data — create tooling for safe, versioned, privacy‑aware dataset curation and discovery.
• Ship models, not slide decks — partner with research and infra to prototype, train, and deploy state‑of‑the‑art voice models that power Sesame’s real‑time companion experience.
• Squeeze silicon — scale training and inference for LLM‑class workloads; chase latency, throughput, and cost until the graphs flatten.
• Wire up monitoring and live evals — surface quality regressions before users or PMs notice.
• Move at startup speed — take ideas from whiteboard to production in days, not quarters; leave a clean trail of tests and dashboards behind.

Required Qualifications

• Expert‑level PyTorch.
• Proven software engineer who loves ML; comfortable writing production code across the stack.
• Hands‑on experience training or fine‑tuning large language or other large‑scale models with a variety of techniques.
• Evaluation expert — you’ve designed metrics and harnesses that actually predict user happiness.
• Deep knowledge of the ML lifecycle: dataset ops, training pipelines, eval frameworks, deployment, and monitoring.
• History of shipping complex projects to production—especially user‑facing, online ML systems—despite shifting requirements and surprise roadblocks.
• High agency and the judgment to know when to sprint solo vs. pull in the squad.
• Track record of setting technical direction, driving consensus, and partnering smoothly with product, infra, and research.

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 [e-mail] 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 per 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.