---
title: 'Staff Frontend Engineer, Systems at Sift Stack, Inc.'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-frontend-engineer-systems-sift-stack-inc-marina-del-rey-ng0wb7ck36ds'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Staff Frontend Engineer, Systems at Sift Stack, Inc.

- **Company:** Sift Stack, Inc.
- **Location:** Marina Del Rey, CA
- **Compensation:** $160k–$250k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/siftstack/76f254f7-1643-4096-815f-95c5f29a3130

## 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.

## About Sift Stack, Inc.

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sift provides a unified observability platform for mission-critical hardware systems, enabling real-time telemetry ingestion, storage, analysis, and anomaly detection for aerospace, defense, energy, robotics, and manufacturing.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $42M raised in July 2025)
- **Headquarters**: El Segundo, California, USA (with expansion to Marina del Rey)
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Austin Spiegel (CEO) and Karthik Gollapudi (Co-Founder), both former SpaceX engineers

## Core Business
- **Primary Industries**: Observability / Data Infrastructure for physical systems; Aerospace & Defense, Energy, Robotics & Physical AI, Advanced Manufacturing, Autonomous Vehicles
- **Target Customers**: B2B / Enterprise – engineering teams building, operating, and maintaining mission-critical machines (e.g., spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, autonomous rail, supersonic aircraft, grid-scale energy systems)
- **Mission**: “Advance science and technology by providing engineers advanced tools and infrastructure that help build our exciting future.” – [siftstack.com/about](https://www.siftstack.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Sift Platform**: A unified observability platform that ingests, stores, and analyzes machine telemetry at scale. Supports real-time streaming analysis, automated data review, anomaly detection, and long-term retention. Integrates with Grafana, LabVIEW, Palantir Foundry, Nominal, Mavlink, and provides REST/GraphQL/Python/gRPC APIs. Deployment options include cloud SaaS, hybrid, on-premises, and air-gapped environments. – [siftstack.com/about/faq](https://www.siftstack.com/about/faq)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised: **$42M** (Series B, led by StepStone, July 2025). Prior rounds: Series A1 (Apr 2024), Series A ($4M, Nov 2023), Seed ($3.5M). – [pitchbook.com](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/525527-47)
- **Notable Investors**: StepStone (Series B lead), GV (Google Ventures – largest investor), plus 10 total investors. – [siftstack.com/about/faq](https://www.siftstack.com/about/faq)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount: 80 employees (as of 2026) – [pitchbook.com](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/525527-47)
  - Achieved **FedRAMP High** certification in partnership with Knox Systems, enabling federal/defense work. – [siftstack.com](https://www.siftstack.com/)
  - Named to Fast Company’s **Next Big Things in Tech 2024** (Transportation category). – [siftstack.com/about/faq](https://www.siftstack.com/about/faq)
  - Expanding to two cities (El Segundo/Marina del Rey) with new senior leaders in engineering, sales, and design. – [siftstack.com](https://www.siftstack.com/)
  - Customer results: Astrolab saved 5,000 development hours and $100K+ in costs; Parallel Systems reduced infrastructure costs by 85% and recovered 150 hours per engineer per year. – [siftstack.com/about/faq](https://www.siftstack.com/about/faq)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Purpose-built for hardware telemetry**: Unlike general-purpose databases or monitoring tools (e.g., Grafana, InfluxDB), Sift handles high-frequency, multi-channel sensor data at scale and provides automated anomaly detection (stateful rules, not just threshold alerts).
- **Compliance moat**: SOC 2 Type II, FedRAMP High, ITAR, CMMC2, NIST SP 800-171 – critical for aerospace and defense procurement.
- **Founder pedigree**: Built by former SpaceX engineers who personally experienced the pain of brittle in-house telemetry solutions.
- **Customer traction**: Deployed in spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, autonomous rail, supersonic aircraft, and grid-scale energy systems. Customers include Impulse Space, Reliable Robotics, Mach Industries, Astro Mechanica, JetZero, K2 Space, and others. – [siftstack.com/about/faq](https://www.siftstack.com/about/faq)

## Strategic Focus
- **Expand into national security and defense** via FedRAMP High certification and ITAR compliance.
- **Scale the platform** to serve more industries (physical AI, autonomous systems, energy) while maintaining air-gapped and on-premises options for classified programs.
- **Grow team** across engineering, product, and go-to-market in two office locations, while preserving a long-term, mission-driven culture. – [siftstack.com/career](https://www.siftstack.com/career)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Values**: Bias for action, customer experience first, own the outcome, thrive together, maintain a long-term mindset. Emphasis on solving real-world problems (not just shipping features) and working across disciplines. – [siftstack.com/career](https://www.siftstack.com/career)
- **Work Policy**: Hybrid – up to 4 days per week in-person depending on team. Free lunch on in-office days via Forkable.
- **Benefits**:
  - Medical (Blue Shield of CA, 100% employee premium covered on select plans)
  - Dental and vision (Principal, full coverage for employee & dependents)
  - 401(k) with Accrue/Vestwell
  - Unlimited PTO (subject to approval)
  - Equity grants (ownership aligned with company success)
- **Engineering Culture**: Interview process is transparent; teams are given autonomy to solve hard technical problems. The company is building “the backbone of tomorrow’s energy systems, aerospace platforms, and autonomous fleets.” – [siftstack.com/career](https://www.siftstack.com/career)

## Sources
1. [siftstack.com](https://www.siftstack.com/)
2. [siftstack.com/about](https://www.siftstack.com/about)
3. [siftstack.com/about/faq](https://www.siftstack.com/about/faq)
4. [siftstack.com/career](https://www.siftstack.com/career)
5. [pitchbook.com](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/525527-47)

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