Staff Software Engineer, Data

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 focused on our data infrastructure, you won’t just write code—you’ll define core architecture and help scale a realtime telemetry platform from the ground up. You’ll work on complex backend systems designed to ingest, store, and serve millions of highfrequency data points per second, enabling faster iteration cycles for some of the most advanced engineering teams in the world.

In This Role, Youll:

• Design and build a horizontally scalable platform for ingesting millions of hardware sensor data points per second

• Develop durable, efficient database solutions to support realtime reads and largescale analytics workloads

• Pioneer data architecture by integrating recent innovations in streaming and storage, including cloudnative and diskless designs

• Help define engineering culture, standards, and processes

• Collaborate closely with peers on architecture, design, code reviews, and scaling strategies
  

• The Skillset Youll Bring:

  • Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or another STEM discipline

  • 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or data engineering roles

  • Handson experience with eventtimebased stream processing or streaming SQL systems using tools like Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Beam, or similar

  • Proficiency with relational and timeseries databases like PostgreSQL, Druid, Pinot, TimescaleDB, or equivalent

  • Experience with largescale distributed systems or lowlatency backend services, ideally written in Go, Rust, or Python

  • Familiarity with DevOps and cloud infrastructure tools such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, ArgoCD, and Terraform

  • Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to problemsolving
    

  • Bonus Points:

    • Familiarity with telemetry data from hardware systems, highthroughput ingest pipelines, or columnar storage formats like Apache Arrow and Parquet

    • Experience building resilient, performant systems that scale to billions of records

    • Curiosity about new data paradigms and eagerness to evaluate and integrate emerging tools and techniques
      

    • Engineering at Sift:

      You’ll join a tightknit team of worldclass engineers building foundational systems for nextgen machines. Technologies youll work with may include:

      • Frontend & Backend: Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Protobuf, React, TypeScript

      • Data Infrastructure: Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Kafka, Parquet, Rust

      • Ops & Tooling: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub Actions, Prometheus, Argo CD, Grafana, Linux
        

      • Location:

        Our team is based in El Segundo, CA, and works in person every Monday and Thursday. We’re open to relocating exceptional candidates or considering candidates who would stay located in the San Francisco, CA area.

        Salary range: $200,000 $250,000 per year. Plus equity and benefits.

        Eligibility:

        Due to the nature of our work, U.S. Citizenship or Green Card status is required to meet ITAR EAR compliance requirements.