Research Engineer

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.

About The Role New 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 NLP, Speech, and/or Computer Vision with a focus on deep learning. 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.

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 [email protected] 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/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.

Compensation Range: $190K - $320K