Software Engineer - Backend

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.

  Requirements

  • 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.

  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

  • 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

  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

  Compensation Range

  $175K - $280K