Staff Frontend Engineer, Systems

Job description

## About Sift Sift 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. **In This Role, You'll:** - Design and optimize data pipelines that run entirely in the browser: Web Workers processing Apache Arrow binary data, persistent caching in the Origin Private File System, and multi-layer invalidation strategies that keep the UI responsive while handling datasets that would crash most web apps. - Build interactive visualizations for time-series telemetry, FFT frequency analysis, geographic mapping, and scatter plots, and many more, each with distinct performance profiles and correctness constraints. When your users are debugging flight hardware, a rendering inaccuracy is a mission-critical problem, not a cosmetic one. - Solve performance problems that frameworks can't: bypassing React's render cycle for 60fps interactions, coordinating worker thread pools, managing memory across large binary buffers, and making architectural decisions about what belongs on the main thread vs. off it. - Architect composable UI systems for technical users who need full data fidelity. Not simplified dashboards, but tools that expose the real complexity of hardware telemetry with zeptosecond level timestamp precision - Work across the stack boundary. Collaborate with backend engineers on API design, binary serialization formats, and query semantics for structured data endpoints. **The Skillset You'll Bring:** - 7+ years building software for the web, with meaningful experience pushing browsers beyond their comfort zone, whether that's performance optimization, binary data processing, GPU rendering, multi-threaded architectures, or something else that required understanding the platform deeply - Strong TypeScript skills and comfort working in a React codebase, but your value isn't in knowing React APIs. It's in knowing when React is the wrong tool for the job and what to reach for instead - Systems-level intuition: you think about memory layout, thread coordination, caching strategies, and data serialization formats, not just component hierarchies - Experience building for correctness under constraint. You've worked on software where bugs have real consequences, or you've built systems where data fidelity and performance couldn't be traded off against each other **Bonus Points:** - Experience with GPU-accelerated rendering in the browser (WebGL, WebGPU, Canvas 2D optimizations) or technical visualization at scale (D3, ECharts, custom renderers) - Hands-on work with binary data formats (Arrow, Parquet, protobuf, FlatBuffers) or columnar data processing - Background in Web Workers, SharedArrayBuffer, OPFS, or other browser threading/storage APIs - Experience in domains where data correctness is non-negotiable: aerospace, scientific computing, medical devices, financial systems, or similar - Projects where you had to build infrastructure that didn't exist yet, like custom caching layers, data processing pipelines, rendering engines, or developer tools **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 **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: $200,000 - $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.