Staff Frontend Engineer (Systems)

Join SIFT as a Staff Frontend Engineer and play a key role in defining the architecture, shaping the product, and influencing the company culture. You will design and optimize data pipelines, build interactive visualizations, solve performance problems, and architect composable UI systems. You will also collaborate with backend engineers and have the opportunity to help evolve and scale the platform. The position offers unlimited PTO, top-tier health insurance, free lunch, snacks, and coffee.

If you’re looking for complex technical challenges and the opportunity to build foundational systems supporting complex machines from the ground up, we want to hear from you

7+ years building software for the web, with meaningful experience pushing browsers beyond their comfort zone, whether that's performance optimization, binary data processing, GPU rendering, multi-threaded architectures, or something else that required understanding the platform deeply

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize data pipelines that run entirely in the browser, ensuring responsiveness while handling large datasets.
• Build interactive visualizations for various types of data, ensuring performance and correctness, especially in mission-critical applications.
• Architect composable UI systems for technical users, collaborating with backend engineers on API design and data serialization formats.

Requirements

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

Preferred

• Experience with GPU-accelerated rendering in the browser (WebGL, WebGPU, Canvas 2D optimizations) or technical visualization at scale (D3, ECharts, custom renderers)
• Background in Web Workers, SharedArrayBuffer, OPFS, or other browser threading/storage APIs - Experience in domains where data correctness is non-negotiable: aerospace, scientific computing, medical devices, financial systems, or similar
• Projects where you had to build infrastructure that didn't exist yet, like custom caching layers, data processing pipelines, rendering engines, or developer tools

Pay

USD 200,000 - 250,000