Staff Backend Engineer

Sift Stack, Inc.•San Francisco, 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 company was founded by former SpaceX engineers and builds data infrastructure for physical systems. The Staff Backend Engineer designs, builds, and operates backend systems that process and store large volumes of real-time telemetry data. The role owns features end-to-end, collaborates with Frontend, Design, and Data teams, and improves backend performance, scalability, and reliability. It also contributes to system evolution, participates in on-call rotations and live-issue debugging, improves observability, and helps raise engineering standards through code reviews, shared patterns, and mentorship. The role is based around Sift’s Marina Del Rey headquarters, with in-person collaboration on Mondays and Thursdays and a full-team week every two months. Candidates may relocate to Los Angeles or work from the San Francisco office. The position requires eligibility to work on ITAR/EAR-regulated projects as a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual such as an asylee or refugee. The salary range is $200,000–$260,000 per year, plus equity and benefits.

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 through post-launch improvement.
Collaborate with Frontend, Design, and Data teams to ensure features address 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 engineering standards through code reviews, shared patterns, and mentorship.