Data Engineer, Machine Learning

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 were 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

Were looking for a Data Engineer to build and maintain the data pipelines that feed Sesames AI models. Youll collaborate directly with machine learning engineers and researchers your job is to make sure they have the right data in the right shape at the right time to train evaluate and ship models.

Sesames data is rich and complex: conversations voice sensor signals and product telemetry. Youll design the systems that take raw unstructured multimodal data and turn it into clean versioned well-documented datasets that ML teams can trust and build on confidently.

This is a deeply technical infrastructure-focused role closer to ML engineering than traditional data analytics. Youll be deeply embedded with ML teams understanding their workflows and building infrastructure that accelerates the full model development lifecycle from data collection and labeling through training and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production data pipelines that prepare conversational voice and multimodal data for model training and evaluation.

• Partner directly with ML engineers to understand data requirements for new models and experiments and deliver datasets that meet those needs.

• Build and maintain infrastructure for dataset versioning lineage tracking and reproducibility so any training run can be traced back to its exact data.

• Develop data quality frameworks that catch issues before they become model quality issues: schema validation drift detection and coverage monitoring.

• Optimise large-scale data processing for cost and performance across Sesames cloud infrastructure.

• Build tooling that makes it easy for ML engineers and researchers to discover explore and request data independently.

• Define and enforce data governance and privacy standards particularly around sensitive conversational and voice data.

• Contribute to architecture decisions around Sesames broader data platform as the team and data volume grow.

Required Qualifications:

• 5 years in data engineering with meaningful experience supporting ML or AI teams specifically.

• Strong SQL and Python skills youll use both daily.

• Experience building and operating ETL/ELT pipelines at scale using modern data platforms and tooling.

• Experience with workflow orchestration systems such as Airflow Dagster or Prefect.

• Hands-on experience with ML data workflows: training data pipelines dataset versioning data labeling pipelines or model evaluation data.

• A solid understanding of how ML teams work you dont need to train models; what matters is understanding what makes a good training dataset and why data quality directly affects model performance.

• Comfort working with unstructured and semi-structured data audio text JSON logs not just clean relational tables.

• Strong communication skills. Youll be embedded with ML engineers and need to bridge data systems and model requirements effectively.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Vector databases embedding storage or feature stores.

• Data from hardware or embedded systems: telemetry sensors real-time streams.

• Distributed compute frameworks for large-scale data processing such as Ray or Spark.

• Kubernetes and managed Kubernetes environments such as GKE or EKS.

• Data privacy frameworks especially around voice or conversational data.

• Building internal tooling or self-serve data platforms.

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 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 $1650/year (medical FSA)

• Guardian Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

• Opportunity to share in the companys success with competitive stock options

Benefits do not apply to contingent/contract workers.

Required Experience:

IC