Staff Backend Engineer

Sift

San Francisco, CA

Full Time

Senior

200k-250k

about 15 hours ago

Job Description

About the Role

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. 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 will define core architecture and help scale a real-time telemetry platform from the ground up, working on complex backend systems designed to ingest, store, and serve millions of high-frequency data points per second.

Key Responsibilities

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

Requirements

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

Nice to Have

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

Qualifications

U.S. Citizenship or Green Card status is required to meet ITAR / EAR compliance requirements

Benefits & Perks

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

Working at Sift

You'll join a tight-knit team of world-class engineers building foundational systems for next-gen machines. Technologies include Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Protobuf, React, TypeScript, Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Kafka, Parquet, Rust, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub Actions, Prometheus, Argo CD, Grafana, and Linux.

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