Two engineers from SpaceX,
building the tools they wished they had.

Austin Spiegel is the co-founder of Sift, where he leads engineering, technical strategy, and go-to-market. He studied computer science at the University of Southern California before joining SpaceX, where he spent nearly five years building mission-critical software across rocket and spacecraft manufacturing, and tools for developing and operating the Starlink satellite constellation.

After a year as a software engineering manager at Riot Games, Austin reconnected with co-founder Karthik Gollapudi and began building Sift from the conviction that the data infrastructure behind SpaceX's engineering culture should be available to every hardware company. He is based in Los Angeles.

Karthik Gollapudi is the co-founder of Sift, the data infrastructure platform built for hardware engineering teams. Growing up near JPL, he developed an early passion for making science fiction a reality, competing in FIRST Robotics before studying computer science.

At SpaceX, he led the Dragon simulation team and later oversaw Dragon flight software operations, serving as the responsible engineer for the CRS-24 and CRS-25 missions to the International Space Station. It was there he recognized that the tools enabling SpaceX's engineering speed didn't exist anywhere else in the industry. Karthik is based in Los Angeles.