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SiftstackSiftstackSan Francisco, CA

Staff Backend Engineer

Designs and builds scalable backend systems for real-time telemetry data ingestion, storage, and serving at massive scale. Requires 7+ years backend experience, distributed systems knowledge, Go/Rust/Python, SQL, and Kubernetes.

200k – 250k/yr
Hybrid7+ YOEBackend Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate backend systems that process and store large volumes of real-time telemetry data.
  • Own features end-to-end, from design to post-launch improvement.
  • Collaborate with Frontend, Design, and Data teams to ensure features solve real customer problems.
  • Optimize backend systems for performance, scalability, and reliability.
  • Contribute to system evolution—migrating services, introducing caches, and improving storage or indexing layers.
  • Participate in on-call rotations, debugging live issues, and improving observability.
  • Raise the bar through code reviews, shared patterns, and mentorship.

Requirements

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or another STEM discipline.
  • 7+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure roles.
  • Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals—state, fault tolerance, recovery.
  • Experience with Go, Rust, or Python, and strong Linux/networking fundamentals.
  • Deep knowledge of SQL and operational database experience (indexing, migrations, tuning).
  • Experience building and scaling APIs (REST, gRPC/Protobuf).
  • Strong debugging skills and a production-first mindset.
  • Familiarity with Kubernetes, Prometheus, Argo CD, and other modern infrastructure tools.

Nice-to-Haves

  • Experience with streaming or time-series data systems (Kafka, Flink, TimescaleDB, etc.).
  • Experience with performance tuning and profiling at query or service layers.
  • Familiarity with observability tools (Datadog, Grafana).
  • Background in hardware or telemetry-heavy environments.

Compensation

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

Technologies

  • Frontend & Backend: Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Protobuf, React, TypeScript.
  • Data Infrastructure: Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Kafka, Parquet, Rust.
  • Ops & Tooling: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub Actions, Prometheus, Argo CD, Grafana, Linux.

Skills

GoRustPythonSQLPostgresgRPCProtobufKubernetesPrometheusArgo CdKafkaFlinkAWSDockerLinux
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