Staff Backend Engineer
Sift Stack, Inc.5 days ago
Marina del Rey, CA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$200k - $260k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate backend systems for 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 solve customer problems.
- Optimize systems for performance, scalability, and reliability.
- Migrate services and improve caching, storage, and indexing layers.
- Participate in on-call rotations, debug live issues, and improve observability.
- Contribute through code reviews, shared engineering patterns, and mentorship.
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 work including indexing, migrations, and tuning.
- Experience building and scaling APIs with gRPC and Protobuf.
- Strong debugging skills and a production-first mindset.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Argo CD.
- Preferred experience with streaming or time-series systems such as Kafka, Flink, and TimescaleDB.
- Preferred experience with performance tuning, profiling, and observability tools such as Datadog and Grafana.
- Background in hardware or telemetry-heavy environments is a bonus.
Benefits
- Salary range is $200,000–$260,000 per year, plus equity and benefits.
- Hybrid collaboration requires working in person twice weekly on Mondays and Thursdays, with a full in-person week every two months.
- The role is based at the Marina Del Rey, California headquarters, with potential relocation to Los Angeles or work from the San Francisco office for the right candidate.
Tech Stack
Apache FlinkApache KafkaArgo CDAWSDatadogDockerGitHub ActionsGoGrafanagRPCKubernetesLinuxPostgreSQLPrometheusPythonReactRustSQLTypeScript
Categories
About Sift Stack, Inc.
Sift Stack builds a data infrastructure and telemetry analysis platform for hardware engineering teams in aerospace, defense, autonomy, and energy. Its software ingests, stores, and analyzes high-frequency machine data to automate anomaly detection, accelerate testing, and support operations for rockets, satellites, autonomous vehicles, and other mission-critical systems. Founded in 2022 and privately held, Sift is headquartered in El Segundo, California, and was started by former SpaceX engineers.