Staff Frontend Engineer, Systems

Telemetry Today LLC; California; Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Sift, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, CA, seeks a frontend engineer to build interactive time-series visualizations and high-fidelity telemetry dashboards. You will optimize rendering for 60fps, design for complex data, and collaborate with backend teams on APIs and data formats.

Relocation to LA or SF may be considered for the right candidate. Role requires strong TypeScript and React experience, plus systems-level thinking about memory and threading.

Qualifications

• Strong TypeScript skills and comfort working in a React codebase.
• Systems-level intuition: memory layout, thread coordination, caching strategies.
• Experience building for correctness under constraint with data fidelity and performance.

Responsibilities

• Build interactive visualizations for time-series telemetry and geographic mapping.
• Solve performance problems by bypassing render cycles and coordinating worker threads.
• Architect composable UI systems for technical users with high data fidelity and timing precision.
• Collaborate with backend engineers on API design, data formats, and query semantics.

Skills

TypeScript

React

Systems-level intuition

Performance optimization

Binary data formats

Tools

GitHub Actions

AWS

Azure

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Sift is the data infrastructure platform for hardware engineering teams. Sift turns high-frequency telemetry into engineering insights for mission-critical systems. Teams use Sift to build and operate rockets, satellites, autonomous vehicles, energy systems, defense platforms, and more. Founded by former SpaceX engineers who built the tools behind Dragon and Starlink, Sift is building the data infrastructure to herald the AI era for physical systems.

In This Role, You'll:

Build interactive visualizations for time-series telemetry, FFT frequency analysis, geographic mapping, and scatter plots, and many more, each with distinct performance profiles and correctness constraints. When your users are debugging flight hardware, a rendering inaccuracy is a mission-critical problem, not a cosmetic one.

Solve performance problems that frameworks can't: bypassing React's render cycle for 60fps interactions, coordinating worker thread pools, managing memory across large binary buffers, and making architectural decisions about what belongs on the main thread vs. off it.

Architect composable UI systems for technical users who need full data fidelity. Not simplified dashboards, but tools that expose the real complexity of hardware telemetry with zeptosecond level timestamp precision - Work across the stack boundary. Collaborate with backend engineers on API design, binary serialization formats, and query semantics for structured data endpoints.

The Skillset You'll Bring:

Strong TypeScript skills and comfort working in a React codebase, but your value isn't in knowing React APIs. It's in knowing when React is the wrong tool for the job and what to reach for instead

Systems-level intuition: you think about memory layout, thread coordination, caching strategies, and data serialization formats, not just component hierarchies

Experience building for correctness under constraint. You've worked on software where bugs have real consequences, or you've built systems where data fidelity and performance couldn't be traded off against each other

Bonus Points:

Hands‑on work with binary data formats (Arrow, Parquet, protobuf, FlatBuffers) or columnar data processing

Projects where you had to build infrastructure that didn't exist yet, like custom caching layers, data processing pipelines, rendering engines, or developer tools

You’ll have the opportunity to help evolve and scale our platform because we’re still in the early stages of building the product. Relevant technologies include:

Web frontend & backend: React, TypeScript, Redux, Tailwind, WebAssembly, D3.js, WebGL, and Go

Data: Parquet, Flink, Kafka, Redpanda, Beam, DuckDB, Timescale, QuestDB, InfluxDB, and Druid

Infrastructure: GitHub Actions, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform

Location:

Sift’s headquarters is in Marina Del Rey, CA (Next to LAX). We collaborate in person twice a week—on Mondays and Thursdays—and come together for a full week every two months. We are open to relocating candidates to LA or working from our San Francisco office for the right candidate.

Salary range: $200,000 - $250,000 per year. Plus equity and benefits.

U.S. Person Required:

Must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual such as an asylee or refugee in compliance with ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) / EAR (Export Administration Regulations) regulations.