Staff Backend Engineer

Sift Stack, Inc.•Marina del Rey, CA

1d•$200,000 - $260,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Sift is a data infrastructure platform for hardware engineering teams, turning high-frequency telemetry into engineering insights for mission-critical systems. The Staff Backend Engineer will build and operate backend systems that process and store large volumes of real-time telemetry data, owning features from design through post-launch improvement. The role works across engineering teams to solve customer problems and contributes to the performance, scalability, reliability, and ongoing evolution of backend services and data infrastructure. The position includes participating in on-call rotations, debugging live issues, improving observability, and raising engineering quality through code reviews, shared patterns, and mentorship. Sift’s technology may include Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Protobuf, Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Kafka, Parquet, Rust, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub Actions, Prometheus, Argo CD, Grafana, and Linux. Sift is headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California. The team collaborates in person on Mondays and Thursdays and gathers for a full week every two months. Relocation to Los Angeles or work from the San Francisco office may be considered for the right candidate. The salary range is $200,000–$260,000 per year, plus equity and benefits. Applicants must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual such as an asylee or refugee, in compliance with ITAR/EAR regulations.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or another STEM discipline.
7+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure roles.
Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including state, fault tolerance, and recovery.
Experience with Go, Rust, or Python, and strong Linux and networking fundamentals.
Deep knowledge of SQL and operational database experience, including indexing, migrations, and tuning.
Experience building and scaling APIs using REST or gRPC/Protobuf.
Strong debugging skills and a production-first mindset.
Familiarity with Kubernetes, Prometheus, Argo CD, and other modern infrastructure tools.
Must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual such as an asylee or refugee, in compliance with ITAR/EAR regulations.

Nice To Haves

Experience with streaming or time-series data systems such as Kafka, Flink, or TimescaleDB.
Experience with performance tuning and profiling at query or service layers.
Familiarity with observability tools such as Datadog or Grafana.
Background in hardware or telemetry-heavy environments.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate backend systems that process and store large volumes of real-time telemetry data.
Own features end-to-end, from design to post-launch improvement.
Collaborate with Frontend, Design, and Data teams to ensure features solve real customer problems.
Optimize backend systems for performance, scalability, and reliability.
Contribute to system evolution by migrating services, introducing caches, and improving storage or indexing layers.
Participate in on-call rotations, debug live issues, and improve observability.
Raise the bar through code reviews, shared patterns, and mentorship.