Senior/Staff Data Engineer

At Sift, we’re accelerating the development of next-generation machines with the world’s first end-to-end telemetry stack — and we’re expanding our team.

Sift’s founders started this company in order to enable private and government entities to make big, technological strides. Our focus is centered on creating a better world for tomorrow, and we’re making an impact with our highly specialized expertise.

By joining us, you’ll help shape future-focused data infrastructure that will power spacecraft, satellite constellations, renewable energy, autonomous transportation, and more.

Sift is currently looking for team members who are passionate about solving complex engineering problems and building a fast-growing startup.

The Sift team includes top senior engineers and operators, with past experience at SpaceX, Google, Palantir, and Amazon. We believe that the best software is written by those close to the source of the problem. One of our founders, Karthik Gollapudi, 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 Spiegel, was a lead on Starlink’s tools team, responsible for the platform that collected data from over 2,000 Starlink satellites for exploration and data review.

Backed by the best investors in the sector, Sift is positioned at the forefront of machine innovation, with customers who are pushing the boundaries of exploration on earth and in space. We’re providing scalable infrastructure and no-code visualization tools to companies across aerospace, aviation, defense, energy, and transportation sectors.

- 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

- 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

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

The Sift team is based in Los Angeles (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.

- New hire stock equity

- Hybrid workplace

- Free lunch, snacks, & coffee

- Top-tier health insurance: Medical, Vision, Dental