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Sesame is building smart wearables with voice agents, combining hardware and software expertise from founders at Oculus and Ubiquity6, plus leaders from Meta, Google, and Apple. The company is designing a new kind of computer focused on making voice agents part of daily life.
You will own the speaker system end-to-end for a shipping consumer electronics product. This is a highly specialized role requiring deep expertise in acoustic engineering for extremely constrained spaces—the speaker must fit in a fraction of a cubic centimeter while delivering high output at the ear and minimal leakage to surrounding users.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the complete speaker path from transducer selection through enclosure design and factory test
- Translating product requirements (bandwidth, level, distortion, leakage, power budget) into speaker system specifications
- Selecting, specifying, and qualifying speakers with suppliers, including evaluation of unconventional transducer technologies
- Designing and simulating acoustic paths (back volume, ports, leaks, front acoustics, open-ear leakage control, mesh, sealing) in partnership with mechanical and industrial design teams
- Building and measuring prototypes; characterizing frequency response, distortion, maximum output, far-field leakage, excursion, and thermal limits
- Owning speaker limits and protection parameters; partnering with the Audio Lead on tuning and firmware on implementation
- Minimizing speaker-to-mic coupling through the frame with the audio DSP team
- Qualifying the speaker system for reliability across sweat/ingress, temperature/humidity, drop, mesh clogging, and drift over product life
- Setting up and maintaining speaker measurement methods in lab and factory, including golden units, limits, and end-of-line acoustic test
- Supporting builds and factory ramps; root-causing acoustic yield and quality issues; driving fixes with suppliers and contract manufacturers
- Cross-functional collaboration with EE, ME, firmware, and product design teams to trade off acoustic performance against size, cost, and power
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Acoustics, Physics, or similar
- 5+ years of experience integrating speakers into consumer electronics hardware, with at least one shipped product where you owned the speaker system
- Strong grounding in electroacoustics: lumped-parameter modeling, Thiele/Small parameters, enclosure and port design, and behavior of small drivers at their limits
- Hands-on experience specifying and qualifying miniature speakers with transducer suppliers
- Extensive experience with audio test systems (SoundCheck, Klippel, Audio Precision) and measuring distortion, maximum SPL, and rub-and-buzz
- Record of using acoustic simulation (lumped-parameter and FEM, e.g., COMSOL) to make design decisions, validated against measured hardware
- Working knowledge of speaker tuning and protection (EQ, limiting, excursion and thermal protection) and partnering with DSP teams
Preferred Qualifications:
- Masters or Ph.D. in EE, ME, Acoustics, or related disciplines
- 8+ years of experience in speaker or transducer development for consumer electronics
- Experience with wearables, hearables, or products where the speaker sits close to the ear with acoustic volume in fractions of a cubic centimeter, including open-ear designs
- Hands-on experience with transducer technologies beyond conventional moving-coil drivers
- Transducer design experience (motor, diaphragm, suspension) or close work with supplier design teams
- Proficiency in high-level programming languages (MATLAB, Python) for measurement automation and analysis
- Familiarity with human perception of sound and psychoacoustic evaluation of speech quality and intelligibility
- Experience with factory acoustic test development and yield analysis at contract manufacturers
