Software Engineer

Sift Agent Product EngineerSift is the data infrastructure platform for hardware engineering teams. Sift turns high-frequency telemetry into engineering insights for mission-critical systems. Teams use Sift to build and operate rockets, satellites, autonomous vehicles, energy systems, defense platforms, and more. Founded by former SpaceX engineers who built the tools behind Dragon and Starlink, Sift is building the data infrastructure to herald the AI era for 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 polishing the frontend micro-interactions that make the chat experience feel great, 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 telemetryDesign, ship, and operate agentic systems that reason over large-scale time-series data and hardware domain contextBuild 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 guardrailsDevelop and maintain Sift's MCP server, the tool surface that lets both our agents and our customers' AI tools query telemetry directlyWork across the whole stackBuild the frontend surfaces where Sift Agents live, and make them feel greatDesign and implement the APIs that power our agentic capabilitiesRun agents reliably at scale, both in the cloud and on-premBuild evaluation suites that measure whether agents actually help engineers, and instrument quality, latency, cost, and failure modes in productionIntegrate and assess frontier models across providersThe skillset you'll bring:Have 8+ years of professional software engineering experienceGet excited about owning a product area: talking to customers, deciding what to build, and shipping itHave built frontend web applications with technologies like React, NextJS, or similarHave built APIs (REST, gRPC, etc.) or backend services with technologies like Go, Python, Rust, or similarAre curious about new AI products: you try new agents, models, and features as they ship, and have opinions about what makes them goodIf this role excites you, apply even if you don't check every box.Bonus points:Shipped products to users at scale: large data volumes, significant active user counts, or deep technical complexityShipped LLM-powered featuresBuilt agentic systems: multi-step tool use, planning loops, context management, and evalsDesigned tool ecosystems for agents, including MCPWorked with sandboxed or isolated execution of generated codeOperated services in production (Kubernetes, observability, incident response)A personal ecosystem of AI dev tooling: custom agents, skills, scripts, or workflows built to ship fasterA background in time-series data, scientific computing, or hardware test and telemetryBuilt internal agentic tooling that accelerates an engineering orgEngineering 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: ECharts, Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Protobuf, Radix, React, Redux, and TypeScriptData: Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Parquet, and RustInfrastructure: Argo CD, AWS, Docker, GitHub Actions, Grafana, Kubernetes, Kustomize, Linux, Prometheus, and TerragruntLocation: 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: $180,000 - $230,000 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.