What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure position at Sift?
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 at Sift, you won’t just write code—you’ll help define the architecture, shape the product, and influence the culture of a company focused on solving real engineering problems. If you’re looking for complex technical challenges and the opportunity to build foundational systems supporting complex machines from the ground up, we want to hear from you.
In This Role, You'll
You'll have the opportunity to help evolve and scale our platform because we're still in the early stages of building the product. Relevant technologies include:
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: $170,000 - $220,000 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.
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 at Sift, you won’t just write code—you’ll help define the architecture, shape the product, and influence the culture of a company focused on solving real engineering problems. If you’re looking for complex technical challenges and the opportunity to build foundational systems supporting complex machines from the ground up, we want to hear from you.
In This Role, You'll
- Design, build, and maintain scalable, resilient infrastructure solutions to support our growing platform and customer base.
- Collaborate with software engineers to optimize application performance and reliability.
- Implement monitoring, alerting, and logging systems to ensure proactive identification and resolution of issues.
- Automate deployment processes and streamline infrastructure management using modern DevOps tools and methodologies.
- Evolve our backend architecture/infrastructure for both cloud and on-premise deployments.
- Work with the team to set and prioritize our roadmap to maximize customer impact.
- Lead initiatives to improve infrastructure reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
- 8 years of relevant distributed systems experience focusing on designing and managing cloud-based environments (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Hands-on experience with containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and container orchestration platforms.
- Passion for building and operating developer productivity tools, frameworks, and other aspects of platform engineering.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and version control systems.
- Knowledge of automated testing best practices and frameworks, ensuring software reliability through integration, performance, and end-to-end testing in distributed systems.
- You're excited by the ambiguity and high-ownership culture of early-stage startups.
- You are pragmatic, solution-oriented, and scrappy.
- You enjoy working collaboratively with a broad range of job functions and roles.
- Experience with our tech stack: Go, Java, React, TypeScript, Kafka/Redpanda, Flink, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform/CDK
- Or equivalent distributed systems
- Good knowledge of cloud, on-prem, networking, and service architecture in multi-region multi-cloud setups.
You'll have the opportunity to help evolve and scale our platform because we're still in the early stages of building the product. Relevant technologies include:
- Web frontend & backend: ECharts, Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Protobuf, Radix, React, Redux, and TypeScript
- Data: Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Parquet, and Rust
- Infrastructure: Argo CD, AWS, Docker, GitHub Actions, Grafana, Kubernetes, Kustomize, Linux, Prometheus, and Terragrunt
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: $170,000 - $220,000 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.
Salary : $170,000 - $220,000