Staff Backend Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco, CA

Compensation: $200K – $260K • Offers Equity • Offers Benefits

Employment Type: FullTime

About Sift

Sift is the data infrastructure platform for hardware engineering teams. Sift turns high-frequency telemetry into engineering insights for mission-critical systems. Teams use Sift to build and operate rockets, satellites, autonomous vehicles, energy systems, defense platforms, and more.

Founded by former SpaceX engineers who built the tools behind Dragon and Starlink, Sift is building the data infrastructure to herald the AI era for physical systems.

In This Role, You'll:

• Design, build, and operate backend systems that process and store large volumes of real-time telemetry data.

• Own features end-to-end, from design to post-launch improvement.

• Collaborate with Frontend, Design, and Data teams to ensure features solve real customer problems.

• Optimize backend systems for performance, scalability, and reliability.

• Contribute to system evolution—migrating services, introducing caches, and improving storage or indexing layers.

• Participate in on-call rotations, debugging live issues, and improving observability.

• Raise the bar through code reviews, shared patterns, and mentorship.
  

The Skillset You'll Bring:

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

• 7+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure roles.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals—state, fault tolerance, recovery.

• Experience with Go, Rust, or Python, and strong Linux/networking fundamentals.

• Deep knowledge of SQL and operational database experience (indexing, migrations, tuning).

• Experience building and scaling APIs (REST, gRPC/Protobuf).

• Strong debugging skills and a production-first mindset.

Familiarity with Kubernetes, Prometheus, Argo CD, and other modern infrastructure tools.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with streaming or time-series data systems (Kafka, Flink, TimescaleDB, etc.).

• Experience with performance tuning and profiling at query or service layers.

• Familiarity with observability tools (Datadog, Grafana).

• Background in hardware or telemetry-heavy environments.
  

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 Marina Del Rey, CA (Next to LAX). We collaborate in person twice a week—on Mondays and Thursdays—and come together for a full week every two months. We are open to relocating candidates to LA or working from our San Francisco office for the right candidate.

Salary range: $200,000 - $260,000 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.