Software Engineer, Backend (Agentic AI)

Build what the future demands

Sift supports mission-critical machines across aerospace, autonomy, transportation, and energy. We help engineering teams move faster without sacrificing safety, reliability, or real-world impact.

Customer experience first

Every product decision we make begins with a real-world problem, one we’ve either lived ourselves or learned by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our customers. Sift exists to make their work easier, more reliable, and more impactful.

Bias for action

In the world of complex machines, the difference between progress and paralysis is speed. We move fast because the industries we serve demand it. We test, learn, ship, and adapt quickly because the frontier doesn’t wait.

Own the outcome

We don’t stop at shipping features. We follow them into the field, track their impact, and improve relentlessly. Whether you’re building infrastructure or closing a customer loop, you’re accountable for what happens next.

Maintain a long-term mindset

We’re not optimizing for the quarter. We’re building the backbone of tomorrow’s energy systems, aerospace platforms, and autonomous fleets. Our architecture, relationships, and hiring reflect that horizon.

Thrive together

Breakthroughs don’t happen in silos. We build across disciplines, trust each other’s expertise, and grow through challenges. This applies to our team and to the broader ecosystem of hardware and software innovators we support.

Build what moves the world forward

Interested in shaping the future of mission-critical machines? Want your work to be fast, hands‑on, and drive real‑world impacts?

Why people work at Sift

Our customers are shipping real machines: They’ve outgrown their internal tooling, but the commercial options aren’t built for the kind of data they’re dealing with.

Anna • Software Engineer

One of the first things that stood out to me at Sift was the talent density. The engineers here are deeply product‑minded and mission‑driven.

Kevin • Software Engineering Manager

I joined Sift because we’re part of the solution, not in a policy paper, but with tools that teams use every day to build the future.

Mike • Deployment Strategist

Sift has everything I want in a workplace: Challenging problems, brilliant teammates, meaningful impact. I have never been more optimistic about the future!

Evan • Software Engineer

More about interviewing and working at Sift

Equity 101

At Sift, we believe in the power of ownership. Equity isn’t just an additional perk; it’s a way to align our team with the company’s long‑term success.

Engineering interview process

Curious about our interview process? We’ve written the guide we wish every company offered, complete with evaluation criteria.

Sift's values for the Machine Age

What drives Sift? Our values guide how we build, move fast, and partner with engineers to shape the machine age with boldness, clarity, and collaboration.

Benefits

Medical

We offer comprehensive health coverage through Blue Shield of California, with your choice of Silver, Gold, or Platinum plans.

• 100% of employee premiums covered (varies by plan)
• 50% of premiums covered for spouses and dependents (varies by plan)

Dental

We offer full dental insurance coverage (Principal) for our employees & dependents.

Vision

We offer full vision insurance (Principal) for our employees & dependents.

Unlimited PTO

We offer unlimited paid time off to our employees (subject to coordination and approval from your team).

Free lunch

Free lunch for each in‑person day through Forkable (we work up to four days a week in‑person, depending on your team). You are welcome to come work in the office any time!

Coffee and snacks

We offer a variety of snacks, drinks, and cold brew on tap in the office as well as regular food runs (e.g., Smoothie Wednesday).

401k

We offer a 401(k) retirement plan through Accrue 401(k) (formerly Guideline), with an upcoming transition to Vestwell.

Open roles

We’re hiring across engineering, product, and go‑to‑market. If you want to build tools that shape the next era of machine innovation, we want to hear from you.

Software Engineer, Backend (Agentic AI)

Location

San Francisco, CA

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

Engineering

Compensation

• Estimated Base $160K – $200K • Offers Equity • Offers Benefits

Sift's Guide to Understanding Startup Equity

About Sift

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.

About The Role

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

The Skillset You'll Bring:

• 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

Bonus Points:

• 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

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: 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

Location:

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: $160,000 - $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.

Compensation Range: $160K - $200K