Senior Software Engineer, Backend; Agentic AI

# Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Agentic AI)
Sift San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)
Full-time $180,000 – $230,000 / yearAI tools:

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Sift builds telemetry analysis software for hardware engineering teams, and this role owns backend systems for Sift Agents, which investigate anomalies and answer questions about test and flight data. You’ll work directly with customers and build the tools, APIs, and infrastructure that make these agents reliable in production.
* Permanent* Hybrid
* 8+ years### Skills and expertise

Go Python Rustg RPCKubernetesMCPDistributed systems

Flink### Key responsibilities
* Turn customer review workflows into agent capabilities and ship iterations from MVP onward.
* Build and operate agent systems, APIs, and execution infrastructure for large-scale telemetry analysis.
* Create agent evaluations and production observability for quality, latency, cost, and failures.## How this job compares

Compared with 1,635 open senior engineering jobs on October 10, 2026.Pay:
This job pays $180K to $230K a year. The 719 open senior engineering jobs that publish US pay start at $164K on average, so this job starts about 10% higher.

Similar open jobs:
We Love AI Jobs lists 1,635 open senior engineering jobs at 344 companies.

Remote work:
This job is hybrid. 271 of the 1,635 senior engineering jobs (17%) are remote.

AI in this role:
High. AI is the core of the work: building, training or deploying AI systems. The role centers on designing and operating Sift Agents, including their tools, context management, evaluations, and model integrations. It also involves assessing frontier models and making AI agents dependable in production.## Full 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  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,…