AI Agents Incubation @ Meta
Sam Hesson
I build multi-agent systems, spatial computing platforms, and the infrastructure that connects them to real science.
What I Work On
The problems I keep coming back to
I started writing software when I was 14 and never really stopped. Over the years that's taken me from freelance contracting to GE's industrial IoT stack to co-founding Nanome, where I spent seven years building XR-based molecular design tools used by pharma, materials science, and biotech labs around the world. The most interesting problem I worked on there was MARA — a multi-agent system that lets scientists orchestrate complex cheminformatics and bioinformatics workflows by talking to LLM-powered agents. Getting tool-use scaling, agent observability, and cognitive architectures right in a domain where errors actually matter (drug discovery) taught me more than any textbook. Now I'm at Meta, leading an applied AI Agents incubation team and getting to tackle these same problems at a completely different scale.
AI Agents
Multi-agent orchestration, LLM tool-use scaling, cognitive architectures, and making agents actually reliable in production.
Spatial Computing
Real-time collaborative 3D environments — built a molecular design platform in XR from scratch with Unity and custom rendering.
Scientific Computing
Cheminformatics, bioinformatics, molecular visualization. Built MARA so scientists could wire up complex computational workflows without writing code.
Systems & Infra
From IoT platforms at GE to enterprise-grade agent infrastructure. I care about the boring parts — observability, security, deployment.
By the Numbers
Some rough metrics from the last decade and change
Where I've Been
The path from freelancing at 14 to building agents at Meta
Freelance
Software Engineer
Mar 2009 – Feb 2014
California
- •Started contracting at 14. Five years of building whatever people needed — websites, tools, databases.
Triton XR (VR Club @ UCSD)
Founder & President
Sep 2015 – Jun 2016
UC San Diego
- •Started the first VR club at UCSD because nobody had headsets and I wanted to build things.
- •250+ members in year one. Organized HTC's pre-release Vive demo on campus — 750+ people showed up.
- •Alumni ended up in XR at Meta, Apple, Warner Bros, Samsung, Qualcomm.
GE Digital
Software Development Leadership Program
Jun 2016 – Oct 2017
San Ramon, CA
- •Four rotations in GE's premier software engineering program:
- •Full-stack eng — built Industrial IoT webapps with Angular + Java SpringBoot, wrote the test suites.
- •M&A — helped integrate four acquisitions ($280M+), worked directly with founders and exec teams.
- •Platform ops — coordinated 50+ engineering teams with deep dependency graphs on the core platform.
- •Tech analyst — built financial models for C-suite on build vs. buy vs. rent decisions.
Nanome
Co-Founder & Chief Engineer
Aug 2018 – Feb 2020
San Diego, CA
- •Wrote the core rendering pipeline and networking layer for real-time collaborative molecular visualization in VR.
- •Designed the plugin architecture that let us iterate on scientific tools without touching the core platform.
Nanome
Co-Founder & CTO
Feb 2020 – Aug 2025
San Diego, CA
- •Co-founded and built the technical side of a VC-backed startup — molecular design tools in XR, powered by AI agents.
- •Owned Product, Design, and Engineering. Also did sales calls, deployment support, and whatever else needed doing.
- •Built NanomeAI: real-time collaborative molecular design in VR/AR with an agentic backend for simulation and analysis.
- •Created MARA — a multi-agent system where scientists chain together cheminformatics tools through natural language.
- •Shipped to hundreds of institutions across pharma, materials, food & bev, oil & gas, and cosmetics.
Meta
Engineering Manager — AI Agents Incubation
Aug 2025 – Present
Bellevue, WA
- •Leading a team building applied AI agent systems at Meta scale.
- •Using AI to transform how Meta's workforce operates — helping engineers become AI-first and pulling the future forward.
- •Focused on the hard parts: reliability, tool-use orchestration, and making agents useful beyond demos.
Open Source
I learn by building. Here's some of what's public.
voice-agent-oai-test
TypeScriptProof-of-concept for multi-agent voice systems using OpenAI's Realtime API and Agents SDK. Implements chat-supervisor and sequential handoff patterns — the kind of thing I prototype to understand a new API surface quickly.
Built to explore multi-agent voice orchestration patterns
executive-ai-assistant
PythonAn AI agent that handles email triage, drafts responses, and schedules meetings. Built with LangGraph for workflow orchestration and wired into Gmail via OAuth. A weekend spike that actually works.
End-to-end agentic email assistant with real Gmail integration
nanome-lib
PythonThe Python SDK I helped build for Nanome's plugin ecosystem. 12 contributors, 660+ commits. This is the API layer that let scientists and developers extend our molecular design platform without touching the core engine.
660+ commits, 12 contributors — the backbone of Nanome's extensibility
nanome-ai org
Python / C# / Lua62 public repos covering the full Nanome open source ecosystem — molecular docking, chemical properties, CryoEM visualization, MARA agent tools, and more. I architected the plugin system that made all of this possible.
62 repos — molecular docking, CryoEM, MARA tools, and plugin infra
Ethereum / Web3 prototypes
Go / TypeScript / SolidityForked and hacked on go-ethereum, 0x contracts, web3.js, and OpenZeppelin during the 2017-2018 wave. Built a Dockerized IPFS forwarding API. Classic "learn by building" energy.
Early crypto explorations — smart contracts, IPFS, go-ethereum
What I'm Good At
The things I've spent the most hours getting right
AI & Agentic Systems
I've built multi-agent systems from scratch — tool-use scaling, cognitive architectures, observability, the works. Shipped enterprise-grade agents that scientists actually trust for drug discovery workflows.
Spatial Computing & XR
Built a real-time collaborative molecular design platform in VR/AR from the ground up. Custom rendering, networking, spatial UI — all in Unity, all shipped to production.
Scientific Software
Deep in cheminformatics and bioinformatics. Built tools for molecular visualization, simulation pipelines, and computational chemistry across 50+ disease areas.
Engineering Leadership
Scaled a startup eng team from co-founders-in-a-room to a real organization. Also coordinated 50+ teams at GE and integrated $280M in acquisitions. I like the hard org problems.
Kind Words
From people I've worked with
Sam is among the most informed and capable engineers I've ever met. He consistently predicts where the industry is headed and proactively builds for it. He's also a cracked compound engineer.
David Corbitt
Cofounder & CPO, OpenPipe (acquired by CoreWeave) · February 2026
There are far too many positive adjectives I could use to describe Sam so I am only going to mention one here: enthusiastic. I had the privilege of working near Sam at GE Digital where I could see his enthusiasm for using technology to solve problems. His enthusiasm coupled with his drive to deliver business value makes for a potent combination where he is able to pull people together to get hard things done in a highly efficient manner.
Thomas Looy
Digital Transformations Coach · December 2017
Sam is an outlier who possesses excellent technical, leadership, and communication skills. I'd had the chance to work with Sam as part of the Brilliant Manufacturing initiative at GE Digital, and I saw him time and time again going out of his way to ask the right questions and communicate with the right people to ensure that his tasks are done right rather than just meeting requirements on paper and moving on. Sam also spends much of his own time to study the recent tech trends and keep his skills sharp, so that he can actively contribute in product related discussions. Last but not least, Sam is a good friend at work who always stays positive and brings energy to the office. These qualities make Sam a great asset in any organization.
Sanghoon Han
Software Engineering · October 2017