Sift is redefining how modern machines are built, tested, and operated by providing a platform for real-time observability over high-frequency telemetry, eliminating bottlenecks and enabling faster, more reliable development. The company is looking to scale a real-time telemetry platform from the ground up by building complex backend systems designed to ingest, store, and serve millions of high-frequency data points per second.
Requirements
- Hands-on experience with event-time-based stream processing or streaming SQL systems using tools like Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Beam, or similar
- Proficiency with relational and time-series databases like PostgreSQL, Druid, Pinot, TimescaleDB, or equivalent
- Experience with large-scale distributed systems or low-latency backend services, ideally written in Go, Rust, or Python
- Familiarity with DevOps and cloud infrastructure tools such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, ArgoCD, and Terraform
- Familiarity with telemetry data from hardware systems, high-throughput ingest pipelines, or columnar storage formats like Apache Arrow and Parquet
- Experience building resilient, performant systems that scale to billions of records
- Curiosity about new data paradigms and eagerness to evaluate and integrate emerging tools and techniques
Responsibilities
- Design and build a horizontally scalable platform for ingesting millions of hardware sensor data points per second
- Develop durable, efficient database solutions to support real-time reads and large-scale analytics workloads
- Pioneer data architecture by integrating recent innovations in streaming and storage, including cloud-native and diskless designs
- Help define engineering culture, standards, and processes
- Collaborate closely with peers on architecture, design, code reviews, and scaling strategies
Other
- 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or data engineering roles
- Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to problem-solving
- 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.
- 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.
