Staff Software Engineer, Developer Infrastructure

Job description

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 At Sesame, our developer infrastructure philosophy is to give engineers superhuman abilities by building tools that possess the same craft quality and customer focus as everything else we do here. Our North Star is Zero Ops dev infra through aggressive automation and careful, detail oriented tool design. AI is the biggest unlock for automation in a generation and it infuses everything we touch. For the Developer Infrastructure team, every instance of manual effort is an opportunity to solve a customer problem once and for all with great software. At its core, Sesame is a tools company. Join us to build the tools behind a generational device that will Bring the Computer to Life. Responsibilities: - Own and lead the developer experience from onboarding through deploy — dev environments, build systems, CI/CD, test infrastructure, and deploy tooling. - Build frameworks and tooling that make CI fast, reliable, and effortless. Engineers shouldn't have to think about it — it should just work. - Design and build self-serve tooling that lets product and ML engineers move quickly without filing tickets or waiting on you. - Lead teams toward clear, reliable visibility into what's in production, when it shipped, and how it's performing. - Explore and lead what it means to bring AI-assisted intelligence into developer tooling — this is a genuinely exciting frontier, and we're approaching it thoughtfully. - Build and maintain the complex systems that support rapid development: build systems, dependency management, test infrastructure, and developer environments all need ongoing care. - Lead creative thinking about what a performance-sensitive stack — GPUs, co-located servers, real-time requirements — means for the developer environment. There's no established playbook here, and that's part of the appeal. Required Qualifications: We care more about how you think and what you've built than which specific tools you've used. Here's what success looks like in this role: - You're a thoughtful software engineer who also loves infrastructure. You write clean, well-designed code and lead by example in caring about the experience of the people using what you build. - You've worked on CI/CD systems and have real experience building and leading durable solutions to the hard problems — slow builds, flaky tests, painful merges. - You've built and led developer tooling that other engineers genuinely wanted to use: self-serve frameworks, CLI tools, build systems, environment setup, or debugging tools. - You're comfortable in Python and/or TypeScript — our monorepo leans on both. - You have 7+ years in software engineering, with meaningful time spent building and leading developer infrastructure or tooling initiatives. - Automation is your default. You build solutions proactively — doing something manually twice feels like a problem worth solving. - You think from the perspective of the engineers using your work, and lead with empathy. Developer experience isn't a buzzword to you — it's the whole job. Preferred Qualifications: We'd love to hear about experience in any of these areas — but we don't expect any one person to have all of them: - Monorepo tooling and build systems (e.g. Bazel, Pants, Monorepo, Nx, or similar approaches). - Cloud-based development environments (e.g. Coder, Codespaces, devcontainers). - CI platform depth — going beyond workflow files into managing runners, optimising costs, and building custom tooling. - Containerised builds and local/CI parity (e.g. Docker, Dagger). - Deploy pipeline patterns: canary deployments, feature flags, automated rollbacks, GitOps. - AI coding tools — not just using them, but leading the configuration, customisation, or building of tooling around them. - Security engineering in developer workflows: dependency scanning, secrets management, supply chain controls. - GCP experience. 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: - 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.