Principal Cloud Platform Engineer, Sift
Core Infrastructure
$211.2-285.7k
OTE
+ Equity
Fraud prevention
Be an early applicant
Fraud prevention
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$211.2-285.7k
OTE
+ Equity
201-500 employees
Company mission
Sift's mission is to help everyone trust the internet.
Role
Who you are
- This role is ideal for a hands-on engineering leader who thrives in solving complex distributed systems challenges, mentors others, and influences both technology and organizational strategy across teams
- You are a systems thinker who thrives in tackling technical complexity and aligning infrastructure investments with business needs. You’re passionate about building reliable, high-scale systems, and you're equally committed to lifting those around you—acting as a multiplier across teams
- Your communication skills, engineering rigor, and product-minded approach help you build trust and drive initiatives from conception to execution
- 10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, SRE, or Infrastructure roles, with a demonstrated focus on distributed systems and platform-level challenges
- Deep expertise in designing, scaling, and operating cloud-native systems on AWS or GCP
- Proven ability to architect infrastructure as code with tools like Terraform or CloudFormation
- Advanced programming skills in languages such as Java, Python, or Scala
- Extensive experience with messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and distributed databases (e.g., BigTable, Snowflake)
- Strong knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes
- A track record of reducing operational complexity through automation, observability, and self-healing systems
- Experience influencing architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with a history of mentoring and cross-functional leadership
What the job involves
- The Core Platform team at Sift builds and evolves the foundational systems that power our online services. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll play a critical leadership role in shaping the technical strategy, architecture, and direction of our infrastructure and services platform
- You’ll drive initiatives that enhance the availability, reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems—ensuring they are resilient, secure, and aligned with the growing needs of our customers and business
- Provide technical leadership and vision for Sift’s online infrastructure—ensuring it is highly available, performant, and scalable
- Drive architecture and design of immutable, fault-tolerant, multi-region infrastructure and services
- Lead the implementation of sophisticated multi-region deployments (e.g., BigTable clusters with regional routing strategies) to meet global customer needs
- Solve high-scale, high-throughput problems requiring deep understanding of messaging systems, distributed data stores, and real-time computation
- Guide improvements to developer workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and local development environments to streamline efficiency across teams
- Architect and build robust internal libraries and platforms for interacting with our core systems—data stores, messaging layers, and infrastructure services
- Develop proactive monitoring and self-healing systems to improve the resilience of critical services
- Act as a strategic advisor to engineering teams, providing deep technical guidance on data architecture, service optimization, caching strategies, and scalability planning
- Participate in and help evolve our on-call strategy, ensuring rapid and effective incident response while reducing long-term operational toil
- Mentor and coach senior engineers across teams, driving engineering excellence and knowledge sharing
Application process
- Introduction interview: a 30-minute session with a recruiter to discuss your background and the role
- Hiring Manager interview: a 60-minute interview with the hiring manager to explore your fit for the position
- Virtual onsite loop with the team: a comprehensive session comprising four interviews lasting approximately 4 hours, covering system design, coding abilities, deep dive, and values and behavior-based conversations
- During these sessions, you will have the opportunity to learn about company culture, meet engineers or peers from your team, and discuss distributed system problems. You will have time for interesting questions and gain transparency regarding your future responsibilities and the project
Our take
eCommerce sales are growing, unfortunately for online retailers, so too is payment fraud. In a landscape where 84% of first-time shoppers with smaller merchants are concerned about data security, retailers have to find ways to earn trust.
Sift is one company that sets out to prevent digital fraud by verifying customer identities and payment methods, giving its clients, who include Twitter, McDonalds Harry’s, DoorDash, and Poshmark, the ability to confidently gain trust from their own customers.
Worldwide, sift serves tens of thousands of websites and apps and analyses over 70B account sign ups and purchases each month. Building on its growth and successful fundraising efforts, Sift acquired longtime partner Chargeback, a leader in real-time dispute management for merchants and passwordless authentication company Keyless. These acquisitions allow Sift to offer its customers a more complete solution moving forward.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-2% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Apr 2021
$50m
SERIES E
Mar 2018
$53m
SERIES D
Total funding: $156.6m
Company benefits
- Competitive total compensation package
- 401k plan
- Medical, dental and vision coverage
- Wellness reimbursement
- Education reimbursement
- Flexible time off
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Jason Tan
(Executive Chairman)Having studied at the University of Washington, Jason spent almost 3 years as a Zillow Software Design Engineer, before joining Optify and working as CTO of BuzzLabs for a year. They founded Sift in June 2011, serving initially as CEO and since January 2021 as Executive Chairman.
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