Software Engineer, Backend (Agentic AI)

Job description

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 If 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 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.