Founding Product Manager (Principal/Director)

At Sift, we’re accelerating the development of next-generation machines with the world’s first observability stack for hardware sensor data — and we’re expanding our team.

Sift’s founders started this company to enable private and government entities to operate smoother and innovate faster. Our focus is on creating a better world for tomorrow, and we’re making an impact with our highly specialized expertise.

By joining us, you’ll help shape future-focused data infrastructure that will power spacecraft, satellite constellations, renewable energy, autonomous transportation, and more.

Sift seeks team members who are passionate about solving complex engineering problems and building a fast-growing startup.

About the Role

Sift is hiring a founding product manager to guide product strategy and develop our roadmap. In this role, you’ll be pivotal in understanding customer challenges and ensuring our product provides meaningful solutions to complex engineering problems. You’ll partner closely with customers, go-to-market teams, and engineers to ensure alignment between Sift’s vision and our user’s needs. You’ll also have the unique opportunity to shape our process from the ground up.

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.

• Guide the vision, strategy, and execution of 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 for existing customers and drive new revenue.
• Set up instrumentation to measure and validate product value, ensuring product decisions are based on clear metrics.
• Build a scalable product development process, facilitating smooth collaboration between design, engineering, and product functions.

• 7+ 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.
• Experience in any of the following is preferred: 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)

• 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.

Our Team:

We’re comprised of senior engineers and operators from SpaceX, Google, and Palantir. We believe that the best software is written by those close to the source of the problem. One of our founders, Karthik, was a Dragon flight software lead responsible for two Dragon missions to the ISS. His team used SpaceX’s end-to-end data platform before, during, and after every Dragon mission. Our other co-founder, Austin, was a lead on Starlink’s tools team, responsible for the platform that collected data from over 2000 Starlink satellites for exploration and data review.

Location:

The Sift team is based in El Segundo, Los Angeles and requires relocation. We collaborate in person two times per week, Monday and Thursday. We work closely with hardware companies, many of which are based in LA, building everything from autonomous vehicles to spacecraft. Being nearby for site visits and collaboration is essential for a customer-centric company.