Senior Platform Engineer

At Sift, we’re redefining how modern machines are built, tested, and operated. Our platform gives engineers realtime observability over highfrequency telemetry—eliminating bottlenecks and enabling faster, more reliable development.

Sift was born from our work at SpaceX on Dragon, Falcon, Starlink, and Starship—where scaling telemetry, debugging flight systems, and ensuring mission reliability demanded new infrastructure. Founded by a team from SpaceX, Google, and Palantir, Sift is built for missioncritical systems where precision and scalability are nonnegotiable.

As an early engineer at Sift, you won’t just write code—you’ll help define the architecture, shape the product, and influence the culture of a company focused on solving real engineering problems. If you’re looking for complex technical challenges and the opportunity to build foundational systems supporting complex machines from the ground up, we want to hear from you.

In This Role, Youll:

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, resilient infrastructure solutions to support our growing platform and customer base.

• Collaborate with software engineers to optimize application performance and reliability.

• Implement monitoring, alerting, and logging systems to ensure proactive identification and resolution of issues.

• Automate deployment processes and streamline infrastructure management using modern DevOps tools and methodologies.

• Evolve our backend architectureinfrastructure for both cloud and onpremise deployments.

• Work with the team to set and prioritize our roadmap to maximize customer impact.

• Lead initiatives to improve infrastructure reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
  

• The Skillset Youll Bring:

  • 8+ years of relevant distributed systems experience focusing on designing and managing cloudbased environments (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).

  • Handson experience with containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and container orchestration platforms.

  • Passion for building and operating developer productivity tools, frameworks, and other aspects of platform engineering.

  • Familiarity with CICD pipelines and version control systems.

  • Knowledge of automated testing best practices and frameworks, ensuring software reliability through integration, performance, and endtoend testing in distributed systems.

  • Youre excited by the ambiguity and highownership culture of earlystage startups.

  • You are pragmatic, solutionoriented, and scrappy.

  • You enjoy working collaboratively with a broad range of job functions and roles.

  • Experience with our tech stack: Go, Java, React, TypeScript, KafkaRedpanda, Flink, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and TerraformCDK

    • Or equivalent distributed systems

    • • Good knowledge of cloud, onprem, networking, and service architecture in multiregion multicloud setups.
        

      • Engineering At Sift:

        Youll have the opportunity to help evolve and scale our platform because were still in the early stages of building the product. Relevant technologies include:

        • Web frontend & backend: ECharts, Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Protobuf, Radix, React, Redux, and TypeScript

        • Data: Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Parquet, and Rust

        • Infrastructure: Argo CD, AWS, Docker, GitHub Actions, Grafana, Kubernetes, Kustomize, Linux, Prometheus, and Terragrunt

        • Location:

          The Sift team is based in El Segundo. We collaborate in person two times per week, Monday and Thursday. We work closely with hardware companies, many of which are based in LA, building everything from autonomous vehicles to spacecraft. As a customercentric company, being nearby for site visits and collaboration is essential. Sift is open to relocating you to LA.
          

          Salary range: $170,000 $220,000 per year. Plus equity and benefits.

          Eligibility:

          US Person Required: Must be a U.S. Citizen or Green Card Holder due to ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) EAR (Export Administration Regulations) compliance requirements.