Staff Software Engineer (Data)

Role overview

Join Sift as a Staff Software Engineer (Data) to define core architecture and help scale a real-time telemetry platform. You’ll build backend systems and data infrastructure for high-volume event ingestion, storage, and analytics, while shaping engineering standards and culture.

Key missions

• Define and evolve the core architecture for a real-time telemetry platform from the ground up
• Design and build a horizontally scalable ingest platform for millions of hardware sensor datapoints per second
• Develop durable, efficient database solutions to support real-time reads and large-scale analytics workloads

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with peers on architecture, design, code reviews, and scaling strategies
• Help define engineering culture, standards, and processes
• Build resilient, performant systems that scale to very large datasets

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or data engineering
• STEM degree (Computer Science/Engineering/Physics or equivalent)
• Hands-on experience with event-time stream processing or streaming SQL (e.g., Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Beam, or similar)
• Proficiency with relational and time-series databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Druid, Pinot, TimescaleDB, or equivalent)
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems and/or low-latency backend services (ideally in Go, Rust, or Python)
• Strong communication and collaborative problem-solving

Nice to have

• Familiarity with DevOps/cloud tools: Kubernetes, Prometheus, ArgoCD, Terraform
• Experience with telemetry from hardware systems and high-throughput ingest pipelines
• Exposure to columnar formats like Apache Arrow and Parquet
• Curiosity about emerging data paradigms and new tools/techniques
• Experience scaling to billions of records