Staff Frontend Engineer, Systems

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

• Design and optimize data pipelines that run entirely in the browser: Web Workers processing Apache Arrow binary data, persistent caching in the Origin Private File System, and multi-layer invalidation strategies that keep the UI responsive while handling datasets that would crash most web apps.
• Build interactive visualizations for time-series telemetry, FFT frequency analysis, geographic mapping, and scatter plots, and many more, each with distinct performance profiles and correctness constraints. When your users are debugging flight hardware, a rendering inaccuracy is a mission-critical problem, not a cosmetic one.
• Solve performance problems that frameworks can't: bypassing React's render cycle for 60fps interactions, coordinating worker thread pools, managing memory across large binary buffers, and making architectural decisions about what belongs on the main thread vs. off it.
• Architect composable UI systems for technical users who need full data fidelity. Not simplified dashboards, but tools that expose the real complexity of hardware telemetry with zeptosecond level timestamp precision - Work across the stack boundary. Collaborate with backend engineers on API design, binary serialization formats, and query semantics for structured data endpoints.
  
  

The Skillset You'll Bring

• 7 years building software for the web, with meaningful experience pushing browsers beyond their comfort zone, whether that's performance optimization, binary data processing, GPU rendering, multi-threaded architectures, or something else that required understanding the platform deeply
• Strong TypeScript skills and comfort working in a React codebase, but your value isn't in knowing React APIs. It's in knowing when React is the wrong tool for the job and what to reach for instead
• Systems-level intuition: you think about memory layout, thread coordination, caching strategies, and data serialization formats, not just component hierarchies
• Experience building for correctness under constraint. You've worked on software where bugs have real consequences, or you've built systems where data fidelity and performance couldn't be traded off against each other
  
  

Bonus Points

• Experience with GPU-accelerated rendering in the browser (WebGL, WebGPU, Canvas 2D optimizations) or technical visualization at scale (D3, ECharts, custom renderers)
• Hands-on work with binary data formats (Arrow, Parquet, protobuf, FlatBuffers) or columnar data processing
• Background in Web Workers, SharedArrayBuffer, OPFS, or other browser threading/storage APIs - Experience in domains where data correctness is non-negotiable: aerospace, scientific computing, medical devices, financial systems, or similar
• Projects where you had to build infrastructure that didn't exist yet, like custom caching layers, data processing pipelines, rendering engines, or developer tools
  
  

Engineering At SIFT

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: React, TypeScript, Redux, Tailwind, WebAssembly, D3.js, WebGL, and Go
• Data: Parquet, Flink, Kafka, Redpanda, Beam, DuckDB, Timescale, QuestDB, InfluxDB, and Druid
• Infrastructure: GitHub Actions, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform
  
  

Location:

SIFT’s headquarters is in Marina del Rey, 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: $200,000 - $250,000 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.