Senior/Staff Software Engineer at Sift

At Sift, we aim to accelerate the advent of next-generation machines, improving our lives on and off the planet. We’re at an inflection point where connected machines will enter nearly everything we do. Sift is building data infrastructure underpinning the engineering, manufacturing, and operation of these machines. Our system is inspired by processes and software built at SpaceX for Dragon, Falcon, Starlink, and Starship.

We’re a fast-growing startup with engineers and operators from SpaceX, Google, Palantir, and Amazon backed by the best investors in the sector. We’re looking for high-performing engineers to lay the foundation of Sift. As a founding engineer, you’ll shape the tech stack, product, and culture. You should be passionate about working closely with companies solving complex engineering challenges, including satellite constellations, renewable energy, and autonomous transportation.

In This Role, You'll:

- Design and build a high-performance, scalable, end-to-end data platform for hardware engineering

- Design and build a delightful user interface for visualizing and transforming millions of data points

- Work closely with customers, including hardware engineers, to understand their problems and find efficient solutions

- Help define engineering culture, standards, and processes

- Collaborate with peers on architecture, design, and code reviews

The Skillset You'll Bring:

- Bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, engineering, math, physics, or STEM discipline

- 5+ years of experience in software engineering or data engineering

- Experience designing and building large-scale, distributed systems or web applications using Go, Python, or an equivalent language

- Self-starter, able to navigate ambiguity and changing priorities

- Team player with excellent communication skills and a collaborative work ethic

Bonus Points:

- Experience working with in-stream data processing and analytics using Apache Kafka, Flink, Beam, or similar

- Experience with relational and non-relational databases, e.g. PostgreSQL, Druid, Pinot, Timescale, or similar

- Experience with data exploration tools like Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, Metabase, PowerBI, or similar

- Strong understanding of DevOps principles; version control, testing, continuous integration, build, deployment and monitoring

- Front-end experience in React or a similar JavaScript framework

Engineering At Sift:

- You’ll have the opportunity to heavily influence our stack because we’re still in the early stages of building the product. Relevant technologies include:

- Web frontend & backend: Go, React, TypeScript, WebAssembly, D3.js, WebGL, and Tailwind

- Data: Parquet, Flink, Kafka, Beam, DuckDB, Timescale, QuestDB, InfluxDB, and Druid

- Infrastructure: GitHub Actions, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform

Our Team:

We’re comprised of senior engineers and operators from SpaceX, Google, Palantir, and Astra. We believe that the best software is written by those close to the source of the problem. One of our founders, Karthik, was a Dragon flight software lead responsible for two Dragon missions to the ISS. His team used SpaceX’s end-to-end data platform before, during, and after every Dragon mission. Our other co-founder, Austin, was a lead on Starlink’s tools team, responsible for the platform that collected data from over 2000 Starlink satellites for exploration and data review.

Location:

The Sift team is based in Los Angeles. We'll work closely with hardware companies building everything from autonomous vehicles to spacecraft, many based in LA. As a customer-centric company, it's essential to be nearby for site visits and collaboration.

Benefits:

- Unlimited PTO

- Free lunch & snacks

- Top-tier health insurance: Medical, Vision, Dental