Staff Backend Engineer

About the role

Sift is building a data infrastructure platform for hardware engineering teams, turning high‑frequency telemetry into actionable insights. As a Staff Backend Engineer you will design, build, and operate large‑scale backend systems that process real‑time telemetry for rockets, satellites, autonomous vehicles and more.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop, and operate backend services that ingest, store, and serve massive streams of telemetry data.
• Own features end‑to‑end, from initial design through post‑launch improvements and on‑call support.
• Collaborate with frontend, design, and data teams to deliver customer‑focused solutions.
• Optimize systems for performance, scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Drive system evolution by migrating services, adding caches, and improving storage or indexing layers.
• Participate in on‑call rotations, debug live incidents, and enhance observability.
• Raise engineering standards through code reviews, shared patterns, and mentorship.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics or a related STEM field.
• 7+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure engineering.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts such as state management, fault tolerance, and recovery.
• Strong debugging skills and a production‑first mindset.
• U.S. citizenship, lawful permanent residency, or protected status in compliance with ITAR.

Required skills

• Programming languages: Go, Rust, Python.
• Linux/Unix environment and networking fundamentals.
• SQL and operational database expertise (indexing, migrations, tuning), especially PostgreSQL.
• API design and implementation using REST, gRPC, and Protobuf.
• Container orchestration with Kubernetes.
• Monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Continuous delivery with Argo CD and GitHub Actions.
• Experience with streaming and time‑series technologies (Kafka, Flink, TimescaleDB, Apache Arrow, Parquet, DataFusion).
• Cloud infrastructure on AWS, Docker, and related DevOps tooling.

What we offer

• Salary range $200,000 – $260,000 per year, plus equity.
• Comprehensive benefits package.
• Hybrid work model with two days onsite in San Francisco (or relocation to LA).
• Opportunity to work on cutting‑edge data infrastructure for next‑generation physical systems.