{"id":128122,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sesame-ai-staff-software-engineer-backend-infrastructure","title":"Staff Software Engineer, Backend Infrastructure","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":"B","score":84,"open_postings":22,"ghost_share":0.182,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":148,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","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":175000,"max":280000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":280000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Voice Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"CloudFormation","optional":true},{"name":"KServe","optional":true},{"name":"Pulumi","optional":true},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true},{"name":"Ray","optional":true},{"name":"Ray Serve","optional":true},{"name":"Seldon Core","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true},{"name":"TorchServe","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-05T00:45:16Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-05-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T23:40:13Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":168,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":167},"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.\nResponsibilities:\nDesign, build, and maintain secure, maintainable, self-serve core infrastructure that engineering teams can rely on and operate independently.\n\nLead the architecture and evolution of a modern ML training infrastructure - scalable, reproducible, and built for rapid experimentation.\n\nBuild and operate a modern model serving architecture with a focus on reliability, cost efficiency, and low latency.\n\nLead and own the low-latency voice interface and audio processing pipeline - a technically demanding, performance-sensitive system at the core of Sesame's product.\n\nBuild developer tooling, server infrastructure, and data infrastructure that is high leverage and low maintenance - the kind that makes other engineers faster without creating new dependencies on you.\n\nLead technical direction within your domain, bring others along through clear communication and well-reasoned proposals, and raise the engineering bar across the team.\n\nRequired Qualifications:\nA strong systems thinker who is equally comfortable leading technical direction and getting hands-on with implementation.\n\n7+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in infrastructure, platform, or ML systems roles.\n\nHands-on reliability engineering experience - you have well-formed convictions about observability, monitoring, deployment systems, and loosely coupled architectures, and you've put them into practice at scale.\n\nProven track record of building and shipping services at scale, with all the operational complexity that comes with it.\n\nKubernetes - significant production experience building, operating, and scaling Kubernetes clusters.\n\nExperience designing and shipping flexible domain models and APIs - you think carefully about boundaries, contracts, and long-term maintainability.\n\nA default toward automation - you've consistently built efficiency gains through automation and have the track record to show it.\n\nStrong communication skills - you can lead your own direction, write clearly about tradeoffs, and bring engineers and stakeholders along with you.\n\nPreferred Qualifications:\nWe'd love to hear about experience in any of these areas - we don't expect any one person to have all of them:\nInfrastructure as Code at scale - significant IaC experience, preferably Terraform; CloudFormation, Pulumi, or Kubernetes-based approaches also welcome. Ideally you've led, architected, or contributed to a multi-stack, self-serve IaC system and understand the challenges of building infra that teams can own independently.\n\nML infrastructure - any combination of the following:\nPyTorch experience, especially model optimization for serving.\n\nML training or serving experience in general.\n\nExperience building ML serving and/or training infrastructure (TorchServe, Seldon, KServe, Ray Serve, or similar).\n\nExperience building and leading large-scale distributed training and serving systems.\n\nData engineering - pipeline design, dataset management, or data platform experience.\n\nDatabase design - complex schema design, query optimization, and hard data modeling decisions across relational and non-relational stores.\n\nReal-time communication systems - low-latency audio, video, or streaming infrastructure.\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":4506,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"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":"2026-05-05T00:45:16Z"}],"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":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":34,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.775,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":167,"expected_fill_days":148,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":280000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sesame-ai-staff-software-engineer-backend-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sesame-ai-staff-software-engineer-backend-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T00:45:55Z","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":1075,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"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-staff-software-engineer-backend-infrastructure"},{"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-staff-software-engineer-backend-infrastructure"},{"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-staff-software-engineer-backend-infrastructure"},{"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-staff-software-engineer-backend-infrastructure\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsesame-ai-staff-software-engineer-backend-infrastructure"}]}