Backend Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design and build the backend systems and services that power Sesame's product. Own the data models, the APIs, and the distributed systems.
• Write software that's built to last, focusing on scalability, reliability, and correctness.
• Build and evolve frameworks and libraries that other engineers build on.
• Own the full lifecycle of services: schema design, implementation, deployment, performance tuning, and on-call.
• Work across the data layer, choosing and operating relational databases, NoSQL, queues, caches, search indexes.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and fix them, considering cost, throughput, and latency.
• Own the architecture of systems where ML models are critical: real-time audio pipelines, agentic orchestration, stateful conversation systems.
• Spot opportunities to improve developer efficiency and prototype tools or workflows.

Required Qualifications

• Expert-level in at least one programming language; write clean, well-designed code.
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals: system models, failure modes, consistency tradeoffs, scaling strategies.
• Experience building systems at scale: caching layers, sharded data stores, async processing pipelines, shared-nothing architectures.
• Strong database engineering skills: complex schemas, query tuning, data modeling across relational and non-relational stores.
• Comfortable with protocols and networking: REST, WebSockets, gRPC, HTTP semantics.
• Deploy and run services on Kubernetes.
• Proven reliability engineering instincts from challenging on-call rotations.
• Genuine deep interest in an area of software (e.g., software design, CRDTs, real-time systems, database internals).

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience in: payments (billing, transaction processing, ledgers), search and relevance (search infrastructure, ranking, indexing), real-time media (streaming, low-latency audio/video, RTC).
• Deep Python expertise: maintainable, performant, scalable code.
• Experience building on GCP.

Benefits

• 401(k) with 3.5% employer match.
• 100% employer-paid health, vision, dental for you and dependents.
• Unlimited PTO and sick time.
• FSA with employer matching up to $1,650/year.
• Guardian EAP.
• Competitive stock options.