About the role

Role overview

Join Sift as a Staff Frontend Engineer (Systems). You’ll define parts of the architecture, build composable UI systems, and help shape the product culture—while tackling challenging performance and correctness problems.

Key missions

Design and optimize in-browser data pipelines that run entirely in the browser (e.g., using Web Workers and Apache Arrow).
Build interactive visualizations for complex datasets with strong performance and rendering accuracy.
Collaborate with backend engineers on API design, binary serialization formats, and query semantics.
Help evolve and scale the platform and influence technical direction.

Requirements

Strong TypeScript skills and comfort working in a React codebase (but you know when React isn’t the right tool).
7+ years building software for the web, including experience pushing browsers beyond their comfort zone (performance optimization, binary data processing, GPU rendering, multi-threading, or deep platform knowledge).
Experience building systems where correctness under constraints matters (bugs/data fidelity/performance can’t be traded off).
Systems-level intuition: memory layout, thread coordination, caching strategies, and data serialization.

Nice-to-haves

GPU-accelerated browser rendering experience (e.g., WebGL, WebGPU, Canvas 2D optimizations) and/or visualization at scale (e.g., D3, ECharts).
Hands-on experience with binary data formats (e.g., Arrow, Parquet, protobuf, FlatBuffers) and/or columnar data processing.
Background with browser threading/storage APIs such as Web Workers, SharedArrayBuffer, OPFS.
Domain experience where data correctness is non-negotiable (aerospace, scientific computing, medical devices, financial systems).
Track record building infrastructure and systems that didn’t exist yet (caching layers, data pipelines, rendering engines, developer tools).

Benefits / work style

Full remote.
Unlimited PTO and top-tier health insurance.
Dynamic environment focused on complex technical challenges.

About Sift

Sift is hiring a Staff Frontend Engineer to help define product architecture and build complex systems for the web. The role focuses on browser-based data pipelines, interactive visualization, and collaboration with backend engineers on high-performance APIs and binary serialization formats.

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