Sift is the data infrastructure platform for hardware engineering teams. We turn high-frequency telemetry into engineering insights for mission-critical machines: rockets, satellites, autonomous vehicles, energy systems, and defense platforms. Founded by former SpaceX engineers, we are building the review and analysis layer for the AI era of physical systems.
Hardware programs generate far more telemetry than any team can review by hand. Sift Agents is our answer: AI agents that work alongside hardware engineers, investigating anomalies, reviewing test and flight data, and answering in minutes questions that used to take a day of scripting.
This role comes with real product ownership and autonomy. You will talk directly to customers to understand how they review their machines, decide what to build, and own it from first MVP through every iteration after it ships. The surface area is wide: one day you might be designing the tool interface an agent uses to query billions of telemetry points, the next you might be writing the Kubernetes scaling logic that orchestrates agent workloads. We’re heavy users of frontier agentic products ourselves and have strong opinions about what makes them great. Sift Agents is where we put those opinions to work.
This is a product engineering role, not a research role. Most of the work is the hard part of making agents dependable: tool design, context management, code execution environments, evaluation, and observability.
In This Role, You'll:Talk directly to customers and partner with product to turn real review workflows into agent capabilities: generating dashboards, writing analysis scripts, and surfacing insights buried in their telemetry
Design, ship, and operate agentic systems that reason over large-scale time-series data and hardware domain context
Build everything around the model that makes agents dependable: tool interfaces, sandboxed execution for agent-generated code, context and memory management, custom compaction algorithms, opinionated skills, and guardrails
Build the distributed systems that let long-running agent work stream in real time, survive disconnects, and resume across restarts
Design job-based execution systems that schedule, scale, and tear down agent workloads on Kubernetes, both in the cloud and on-prem
Develop and maintain Sift’s MCP server, the tool surface that lets both our agents and our customers’ AI tools query telemetry directly
Design and implement the APIs that power our agentic capabilities
Build evaluation suites that measure whether agents actually help engineers, and instrument quality, latency, cost, and failure modes in production
Integrate and assess frontier models across providers
Have 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
Get excited about owning a product area: talking to customers, deciding what to build, and shipping it
Have built APIs (REST, gRPC, etc.) and complex backend services with technologies like Go, Python, Rust, or similar
Have a working knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals
Are curious about new AI products: you try new agents, models, and features as they ship, and have opinions about what makes them good
If this role excites you, apply even if you don’t check every box.
Shipped products to users at scale: large data volumes, significant active user counts, or deep technical complexity
Shipped LLM-powered features
Built agentic systems: multi-step tool use, planning loops, context management, and evals
Designed tool ecosystems for agents, including MCP
Worked with sandboxed or isolated execution of generated code
Operated services in production (Kubernetes, observability, incident response)
Worked with streaming or time-series data systems (Kafka, Flink, TimescaleDB)
A personal ecosystem of AI dev tooling: custom agents, skills, scripts, or workflows built to ship faster
A background in time-series data, scientific computing, or hardware test and telemetry
Built internal agentic tooling that accelerates an engineering org
You'll have the opportunity to help evolve and scale our platform because we're still in the early stages of building the product. Relevant technologies include:
Web frontend & backend: ECharts, Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Protobuf, Radix, React, Redux, and TypeScript
Data: Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Parquet, and Rust
Infrastructure: Argo CD, AWS, Docker, GitHub Actions, Grafana, Kubernetes, Kustomize, Linux, Prometheus, and Terragrunt
Sift’s headquarters is in Marina Del Rey, CA (Next to LAX). We collaborate in person twice a week—on Mondays and Thursdays—and come together for a full week every two months. We are open to relocating candidates to LA or working from our San Francisco office for the right candidate.
Salary range: $150,000 - $200,000 per year. Plus equity and benefits.
Eligibility: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.
Skills Required
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Experience building APIs (REST, gRPC) and complex backend services using Go, Python, Rust, or similar
- Working knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals
- Product ownership: talk directly to customers, define and ship product features
- Willingness to collaborate in person twice weekly and attend a full in-person week every two months (LA/SF offices)
- U.S. Person required (U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual) for ITAR/EAR compliance
What We Do
Sift is transforming how modern machines are built and operated. Our platform goes beyond traditional monitoring, enabling automated data review that catches unusual conditions in systems too complex for manual checks. This not only enhances reliability but also dramatically speeds up development cycles. At our core, we provide a unified solution for ingesting, storing, and analyzing vast amounts of machine data. By combining powerful data processing with easy-to-use visualizations, we help engineers make sense of enormous amounts of information. From spacecraft to self-driving cars, Sift is the backbone of innovation for companies pushing technology to new limits. Born from the challenges of spaceflight, Sift aims to accelerate technological progress. We believe that by giving engineers better tools to understand and improve their creations, we can unlock a new era of innovation. Our mission goes beyond solving today's engineering problems; we're building the foundation for a future where the most ambitious machines are developed with confidence, run with precision, and constantly improved. We're also tackling related challenges like simplifying regulatory compliance, and improving manufacturing processes. By connecting data from various sources—from sensors to manufacturing records to regulatory requirements—we're empowering a new generation of engineers to build the technologies that will shape our world. Join us in our journey to usher in this new age of reliable, groundbreaking technology. Whether you're launching rockets, developing autonomous systems, or advancing energy and transportation, Sift is your partner in turning vast amounts of data into insights that drive innovation forward.
