{"id":174968,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sesame-ai-research-engineer","title":"Research Engineer","company":{"id":48220,"name":"Sesame AI","domain":"sesame.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/sesame-ai","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":86,"open_postings":21,"ghost_share":0.143,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":126,"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","New York, United States","Bellevue, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":190000,"max":320000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":320000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Voice Agents","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-17T23:55:13Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-17","last_verified_at":"2026-11-02T18:03:07Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":137,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":137},"description":"About Sesame\nSesame 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.\nAbout the Role\nNew and novel approaches are needed to realize all of our product goals. As a Research engineer at Sesame, you are a research-oriented person with experience in. You are up to date on recent papers and approaches and you have the creativity and the intuition to come up with new solutions based on the application at hand.\nResponsibilities\nDesign, build, and ship novel architectures and models to production.\n\nScale LLM training and inference, improving latency, throughput, and cost.\n\nBuild robust training and evaluation pipelines.\n\nDevelop tooling for safe, versioned, privacy-aware dataset curation and discovery.\n\nRequired Qualifications:\nStrong, hands-on experience with PyTorch.\n\nSolid software engineering skills and a genuine interest in ML, with experience writing production code across the stack.\n\nPractical experience training or fine-tuning LLMs, and a good understanding of how LLM training algorithms work.\n\nExperience designing evaluation metrics and harnesses that reflect real user experience.\n\nFamiliarity with the ML lifecycle: dataset operations, training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, deployment, and monitoring.\n\nExperience shipping complex projects to production, ideally user-facing or online ML systems, and adapting as requirements change.\n\nGood judgment about when to work independently and when to bring in teammates.\n\nExperience contributing to technical direction, building consensus, and working well with product, infrastructure, and research partners.\n\nSesame 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  for assistance.\nFull-time Employee Benefits:\n401 (k) max employer match: 3.5% of compensation\n\n100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental benefits for you and your dependents\n\nUnlimited PTO and sick time\n\nFlexible spending account with employer matching up to $1,650/year (medical FSA)\n\nGuardian Employee Assistance Program (EAP)\n\nOpportunity to share in the company's success with competitive stock options\n\nBenefits do not apply to contingent/contract workers.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2785,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Stock options","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Conversational AI","Speech & Audio AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-30T07:48:08Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 7","filings_12m":7,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":162500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":3}],"liveness":{"score":33,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.739,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":137,"expected_fill_days":126,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":320000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sesame-ai-research-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sesame-ai-research-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-02T21:33:36Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":30124,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":48220},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=48220"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsesame-ai-research-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fsesame-ai-research-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fsesame-ai-research-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/sesame-ai-research-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsesame-ai-research-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":174968}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"sesame.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":174968},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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