Product Manager

About Sift

At Sift, we’re redefining how modern machines are built, tested, and operated. Our platform gives engineers 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 SpaceX, Google, and Palantir team, Sift is built for mission-critical systems where precision and scalability are non-negotiable.

About the Role

As a founding Product Manager at Sift, you’ll drive strategic, cross-functional initiatives that make our product more scalable, reliable, and impactful for mission-critical use cases. You’ll define the roadmap for key areas of the product, such as AI-driven observability, to modernize the hardware observability stack.

Partnering closely with engineering, design, and go-to-market teams, you’ll ensure alignment and momentum across the organization. Your focus will be on strengthening the core of our platform—improving performance, usability, and resilience for our most demanding customers—while helping refine the strategy and processes to drive efficiency within our team.

We’re looking for a PM who thrives in dynamic, high-growth environments and wants to service industries like satellite constellations, renewable energy, and autonomous transportation. This is a rare opportunity to influence an early-stage company's success and direction. You will report to our Co-Founder and CTO and play a critical role in translating our long-term vision into a tangible product roadmap.

In This Role, You'll:

• Lead the vision, strategy, and execution of major initiatives within Sift’s product, ensuring short-term tactics align with long-term goals.

• Establish close relationships with customers to uncover their needs and validate opportunities.

• Own the product development lifecycle from ideation to launch, ensuring alignment with company goals and user needs.

• Collaborate with the go-to-market, design, and engineering teams to set priorities, optimize the product roadmap, and drive business objectives.

• Conduct market research and competitive analysis to shape product strategy, identifying opportunities to expand value and leverage new technologies, such as AI.

• Set up instrumentation to measure and validate product value, ensuring product decisions are based on clear metrics.

• Curate documentation and educate the go-to-market team on new features.

The Skillset You'll Bring:

• 3+ years of experience as a product manager with a proven track record of delivering complex B2B SaaS products. Experience at an early-stage startup is a strong plus.

• An ability to synthesize myriad inputs and build a cohesive roadmap.

• Strong customer empathy with a history of building relationships, conducting deep research, and translating insights into product features.

• Proven ability to collaborate effectively across multiple teams and lead cross-functional collaboration without being a bottleneck.

• Strong understanding of product prioritization frameworks and experience building products that deliver measurable value to customers.

• Technical fluency, with the ability to discuss and align on engineering trade-offs and communicate technical concepts to various stakeholders.

Bonus Points:

• Experience in any of the following:

  • Data warehousing/lake housing (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, Iceberg)

  • Data job orchestration (e.g. Dagster, Airflow)

  • Batch and stream processing systems (e.g. Kafka, Spark, Flink)

  • Data cataloging, discoverability, and life-cycle management

  • Data science models, integrations, or data pipeline development (DBT, Fivetran, AirByte)

  • Enterprise SaaS cloud platform features, such as IAM, security, billing, and multi-tenancy.

What We’re Looking For:

• Someone with a growth mindset who’s excited to build, own, and evolve a product function within a high-growth start-up.

• A PM who thrives in ambiguity and start-up chaos and who can build a structure where needed.

• A business-savvy PM who can connect product decisions with business outcomes and is comfortable prioritizing based on P&L considerations.

Location:

The Sift team is based in El Segundo, CA, and we collaborate in person twice a week—Mondays and Thursdays. We work closely with LA’s leading hardware companies, from autonomous vehicle manufacturers to spacecraft builders. Proximity matters for site visits and deep collaboration, so we prefer candidates local to Los Angeles. We are open to relocation and for exceptional talent we’re open to remote work from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Salary range: $140,000 - $180,000 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.