At Sift, we’re redefining how modern machines are built, tested, and operated. Our platform gives engineers real-time observability over high-frequency telemetry—eliminating bottlenecks and enabling faster, more reliable development.
Sift was born from our work at SpaceX on Dragon, Falcon, Starlink, and Starship—where scaling telemetry, debugging flight systems, and ensuring mission reliability demanded new infrastructure. Founded by a team from SpaceX, Google, and Palantir, Sift is built for mission-critical systems where precision and scalability are non-negotiable.
About the Role
Sift is hiring a hands-on engineering manager to lead and scale our engineering team. In this role, you’ll be instrumental in driving the technical execution of our product roadmap while ensuring our engineering practices are solid and scalable. You’ll work closely with our engineers and product team to solve complex technical challenges and deliver innovative solutions to customers building satellite constellations, renewable energy, and autonomous transportation. You will also have the unique opportunity to develop and refine our engineering processes from the ground up.
We’re looking for an Engineering Manager who thrives in dynamic, high-growth environments and is passionate about building exceptional teams and products. This is a rare opportunity to shape an early-stage company’s success by driving engineering excellence. You will report to our Co-Founder and CTO and play a critical role in aligning the team’s efforts with Sift’s long-term technical vision.
In This Role, You'll:
Lead a team of engineers, accelerate their growth by providing thoughtful feedback and technical mentorship, and effectively manage their performance.
Collaborate with go-to-market, product, and engineering to build and champion a long-term technical roadmap that reduces the operational burden, ensures scalability, and mitigates risk.
Work closely with customers, including hardware engineers, to understand their problems and find efficient solutions.
Drive execution, ensuring high-quality projects are delivered on time and aligned with company goals.
Establish and refine engineering processes, including code reviews, sprint planning, and post-mortems, that increase velocity, maintain product quality, and ensure high technical standards.
Track and report key engineering metrics (e.g., error rates, shipping velocity) to ensure continuous improvement and efficient execution.
Contribute to the codebase, working on high-impact features and helping solve critical technical challenges.
The Skillset You'll Bring:
7+ years of experience in software engineering, preferably B2B SaaS, with at least 2 years of experience leading engineering efforts from analyzing requirements to scoping, shipping, and operating in production.
Bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, engineering, math, physics, or STEM discipline.
Strong experience designing and building large-scale, distributed systems or web applications using Go, Python, or an equivalent language.
Deep systems background and value technical excellence. You deliver well-engineered and durable solutions, leading technical discussions, design, and code reviews.
A demonstrated track record of successful mentorship and accelerating reports growth, being an effective multiplier for the team.
Proven ability to balance hands-on development with team management.
Bonus Points:
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
Strong understanding of DevOps principles; version control, testing, continuous integration, build, deployment and monitoring
Engineering At Sift:
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: React, TypeScript, Redux, Tailwind, WebAssembly, D3.js, WebGL, and Go
Data: Parquet, Flink, Kafka, Redpanda, Beam, DuckDB, Timescale, QuestDB, InfluxDB, and Druid
Infrastructure: GitHub Actions, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform
Location:
Sift’s headquarters is in El Segundo, CA. 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.
Salary range: $170,000 - $250,000 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.
Top Skills
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.
