Sift
1 open Forward Deployed Engineer role at Sift. Curated with comp bands.
Comp on the board: $150K–$200K + equity (Employer provided).
On the board since Aug 2026 · still hiring
Our take
Why Sift
Proof the FDE model has reached hard-tech — SpaceX alumni embedding engineers to wire observability into rockets, satellites, and autonomous machines.
- FDE type
- True forward-deployed
- Travel
- Medium
- Comp
- Competitive
- Stage
- Early-stage
A good fit if you're…
- Infra engineers who want physical-AI and hard-tech deployments over SaaS
- People with high-frequency telemetry / time-series observability chops
- Candidates near Marina del Rey open to twice-weekly in-office work
- Engineers drawn to aerospace and defense customers and ITAR-grade constraints
The telemetry stack for physical machines
Sift builds a unified observability platform for mission-critical hardware — ingesting, storing, and visualizing high-rate telemetry from rockets, satellites, drones and robots at a volume and precision (sub-nanosecond timestamps, air-gapped deployments) most SaaS never touches. Its products span ingestion (Sift Infra), real-time visualization (Explore), CI/CD validation (Reports) and secure on-prem deployment (Governance), and it integrates with NVIDIA and Palantir. The pitch is replacing the brittle, home-grown tooling hardware teams still cobble together with one platform built for the scale and reliability bar of spaceflight.
SpaceX DNA
Sift was founded by SpaceX alumni: CEO Karthik Gollapudi led Dragon flight-software operations across crewed missions, and co-founder Austin Spiegel built Starlink's telemetry database and manufacturing systems. The team pulls additional engineers from Palantir and Anduril. The thesis is lived experience — they fought legacy, home-grown telemetry tooling at the hardest hardware company on earth and are rebuilding it as a product.
What “forward deployed” means here
The Forward Deployed Engineer, Infrastructure embeds with hardware customers to wire Sift into their systems: mapping messy real-world telemetry schemas, standing up ingestion pipelines, and hardening the platform against live rockets and machines. It's true forward-deployed engineering aimed at physical AI rather than chat agents, and among the clearest signs the deployment role is moving into hard-tech, exactly where FDE demand is said to head next. Day to day you translate a customer's one-off scripts and spreadsheets of sensor data into a durable, queryable system of record their whole hardware team can trust.
Who you'd be deploying to
Named customers skew aerospace and defense: K2 Space, Astranis, Impulse Space, JetZero and Reliable Robotics. That surface shapes the job — ITAR compliance, on-prem and air-gapped environments, and failure modes measured in lost vehicles rather than dropped requests. Because ITAR work is restricted to US persons, expect citizenship or residency requirements to surface on parts of the customer base.
Comp, location and format
The board lists $150K–$200K plus equity (employer-provided), with in-office twice a week in Marina del Rey. A competitive early-stage cash band; the founder pedigree and the still-early equity are the real pitch. Given the hybrid cadence, Marina del Rey proximity is effectively a requirement rather than a preference, so weigh the relocation if you're not already in LA.
The funding signal
In March 2026 Sift raised a $42M Series B led by StepStone (with GV, Riot Ventures, Fika and Contrary), bringing total funding to about $67M, and said it would roughly double a team of about 70. For an FDE that means broad ownership now and a deployment function that will formalize quickly over the next year — get in while scope is wide.
Questions candidates ask
Is this really an FDE role or just infrastructure?
Both. You own the customer-facing deployment of Sift's observability stack, but the work is infrastructure-level — ingestion pipelines and telemetry schemas wired against live hardware.
Do I have to be in Marina del Rey?
Effectively yes. The role is hybrid with two in-office days a week at the Marina del Rey HQ, so plan to be local to the LA area.
What background fits best?
High-frequency or time-series telemetry, observability, or data-infrastructure experience — ideally paired with aerospace, robotics, or other hard-tech systems.
Is it stable enough to join?
It's early (Series B, ~70 people) but well-capitalized after the $42M March 2026 raise, with real aerospace customers. Expect startup ambiguity and unusually broad scope.
Analysis updated 2026-10-16
Open roles at Sift
Compare Sift
Others in the same tier
Free forever. Unsubscribe anytime.