Sift is a powerful observability stack that gives engineers complete visibility and control over their data. The company was conceived as a foundational tool, inspired by our work at SpaceX for Dragon, Falcon, Starlink, and Starship, that can support groundbreaking innovation and encourage machine development. Utilizing collaborative features and automated processes, Sift improves the focus of hardware engineers and streamlines workflows for greater accuracy while scaling.

We’re a fast-growing startup with engineers and operators from SpaceX, Google, and Palantir, and 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 horizontally scalable platform for ingesting millions of data points from hardware sensors per second and a robust and durable database solution for storing, reading, and analyzing those 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

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering or data engineering

• 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

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

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

Bonus Points:

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

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

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, Redpanda, 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, and Palantir. 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 El Segundo. We collaborate in person two times per week, Monday and Thursday. We work closely with hardware companies, many of which are based in LA, building everything from autonomous vehicles to spacecraft. As a customer-centric company, being nearby for site visits and collaboration is essential.