Senior Software Engineer, Backend; Agentic AI

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.

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 observability.

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, custom compaction algorithms, opinionated skills, and guardrails

Build the distributed systems that let long-running agent work stream in real time, survive disconnects, and resume across restarts

Design job-based execution systems that schedule, scale, and tear down agent workloads on Kubernetes, both in the cloud and on-prem

Develop and maintain Sift’s MCP server, the tool surface that lets both our agents and our customers’ AI tools query telemetry directly

Design and implement the APIs that power our agentic capabilities

Build evaluation suites that measure whether agents actually help engineers, and instrument quality, latency, cost, and failure modes in production

Integrate and assess frontier models across providers

Have 8+ years of professional software engineering experience

Get excited about owning a product area: talking to customers, deciding what to build, and shipping it

Have built APIs (REST, gRPC, etc.) and complex backend services with technologies like Go, Python, Rust, or similar

Have a working knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals

Are curious about new AI products: you try new agents, models, and features as they ship, and have opinions about what makes them good

Shipped products to users at scale: large data volumes, significant active user counts, or deep technical complexity

Shipped LLM-powered features

Built agentic systems: multi-step tool use, planning loops, context management, and evals

Designed tool ecosystems for agents, including MCP

Worked with sandboxed or isolated execution of generated code

Operated services in production (Kubernetes, observability, incident response)

Worked with streaming or time-series data systems (Kafka, Flink, Timescale DB)

A personal ecosystem of AI…