Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Agentic AI)

We Love AI Jobs; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Sift builds telemetry analysis software for hardware engineering teams. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will own backend systems for Sift Agents that analyze test and flight data, collaborating directly with customers to turn their review workflows into scalable agent capabilities.

You'll design, ship, and operate APIs, distributed services, and Kubernetes orchestration to run large-scale telemetry analysis in production, with a strong emphasis on reliability, latency, and observability.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Ability to own a product area and ship features.
• Experience building APIs and backend services; familiarity with distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Talk directly to customers and translate review workflows into agent capabilities.
• Design, ship, and operate agentic systems for large-scale telemetry analysis.
• Build APIs and orchestration for agent workloads on Kubernetes, in cloud and on-prem.
• Develop and maintain evaluation suites, measuring quality, latency, cost and failures in production.
• Collaborate with product teams and frontier models to improve agent reliability.

Skills

Product ownership

Customer interaction

Tools

Go

Python

Rust

gRPC

Kubernetes

Flink

Distributed systems

REST/gRPC APIs

Job description

# Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Agentic AI)SiftSan Francisco, CA (Hybrid)Full-time$180,000 – $230,000 / yearAI tools:MCPUpload your resume once and Scout applies for youApply with ScoutShare this job:LinkedInXSave imageSift 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 expertiseGoPythonRustgRPCKubernetesMCPDistributed systemsFlink### 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 comparesCompared 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 descriptionAbout SiftSift 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 RoleHardware 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.In 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, 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 providersThe Skillset You'll Bring:• 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 goodIf this role excites you, apply even if you don’t check every box.Bonus Points:• 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