Founding Security Engineer

Overview

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About Sift

At Sift, we’re redefining how modern machines are built, tested, and operated. Our platform provides engineers with real-time observability over high-frequency telemetry, eliminating bottlenecks and enabling faster, more reliable development.

Sift was born from our work at SpaceX on Dragon, Falcon, Starlink, and Starship—where scaling telemetry, debugging flight systems, and ensuring mission reliability demanded new infrastructure. Founded by a team from SpaceX, Google, and Palantir, Sift is built for mission-critical systems where precision and scalability are non-negotiable.

About The Role

As Sift’s founding Security Engineer, you will not just maintain a security checklist; you will define the posture, architecture, and practices that keep our products and infrastructure secure in the most demanding environments.

You will be both hands-on and strategic, building controls, automating compliance, and working directly with customers, auditors, and internal teams to inspire confidence in our platform.

The Founding Security Engineer will own Sift’s security posture end-to-end, with technical security engineering as the primary focus. You will set the standard for how we protect our systems and data, ensuring resilience against modern threats while partnering with external compliance specialists to meet the requirements of aerospace, defense, and enterprise sectors.

This is a high-visibility, high-ownership role : you will be Sift’s first security hire, laying the foundation of our security program and growing it into a dedicated function as the company scales.

In This Role, You’ll

Technical Security

• Build secure CI / CD pipelines with embedded scanning.
• Operate and tune SIEM / EDR (ELK, Datadog, Splunk, CrowdStrike, Prometheus, Grafana). Secure multi-cloud environments (AWS GovCloud, Kubernetes, on-prem).
• Implement zero-trust networking and modern SASE / ZTNA approaches.
• Improve visibility and observability across networks and workloads.

Compliance

Technical Skills

The Skillset You’ll Bring :

Soft Skills

Location

Sift’s headquarters is in El Segundo, CA . We collaborate in person twice a week—on Mondays and Thursdays—and come together for a full week every two months. While we prefer team members to be local, we’re open to relocating candidates to LA or considering remote work from the San Francisco area for the right candidate.

Salary range : $170,000 - $220,000 per year. Plus equity and benefits.

Eligibility

US Person Required : Must be a U.S. Citizen or Green Card Holder due to ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) / EAR (Export Administration Regulations) compliance requirements.

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