Staff Backend Engineer

2 days ago

San Francisco, California, United States Sift Stack Full time

At Sift, we're redefining how modern machines are built, tested, and operated. Our platform gives engineers real-time observability over high-frequency 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 mission-critical systems where precision and scalability are non-negotiable.

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

In This Role, You'll:

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

  • Develop durable, efficient database solutions to support real-time reads and large-scale analytics workloads

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

  • Help define engineering culture, standards, and processes

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

The Skillset You'll Bring:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or another STEM discipline

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

  • Hands-on experience with event-time-based stream processing or streaming SQL systems using tools like Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Beam, or similar

  • Proficiency with relational and time-series databases like PostgreSQL, Druid, Pinot, TimescaleDB, or equivalent

  • Experience with large-scale distributed systems or low-latency 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 problem-solving

Bonus Points:

  • Familiarity with telemetry data from hardware systems, high-throughput 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 tight-knit team of world-class engineers building foundational systems for next-gen machines. Technologies you'll 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:

Sift's headquarters is in El Segundo, CA. We collaborate in person twice a week—on Mondays and Thursdays—and come together for a full week every two months. While we prefer team members to be local, we're open to relocating candidates to LA or considering remote work from the San Francisco area for the right candidate.

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

Eligibility:

U.S. Person Required: Must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual such as an asylee or refugee in compliance with ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) / EAR (Export Administration Regulations) regulations.

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