Sesame is seeking an ML Engineer to join their team, focusing on designing and deploying lifelike voice companions. The role involves owning evaluation pipelines, curating datasets, prototyping and deploying state-of-the-art voice models, and optimizing training/inference for LLM-class workloads. This position requires moving at startup speed, taking ideas from whiteboard to production quickly, and ensuring quality through monitoring and live evaluations.

Must Have

• Expert-level PyTorch proficiency
• Proven software engineering skills with ML focus
• Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning large-scale models
• Expertise in designing evaluation metrics for user satisfaction
• Deep knowledge of the ML lifecycle
• History of shipping complex, user-facing online ML systems to production
• High agency and good judgment for independent work and collaboration
• Track record of technical leadership and cross-functional partnership

Perks & Benefits

• 401k matching
• 100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental benefits
• Unlimited PTO and sick time
• Flexible spending account matching (medical FSA)

ML Engineer

Location

New York , San Francisco, Bellevue

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Machine Learning

Compensation

• $190K – $320K

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 companions 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.

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 careers@sesame.com for assistance.

Full-time Employee Benefits:

• 401k matching
• 100% employer-paid health, vision, and dental benefits
• Unlimited PTO and sick time
• Flexible spending account matching (medical FSA)

Benefits do not apply to contingent/contract workers

Compensation Range: $190K - $320K