Lightfield

Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

HQ: San Francisco · Staff+

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 133 days ago

TypeScriptNode.jsCode ReviewPostgreSQLAWSAPI DevelopmentLLMsCRMLeadershipMentoring

About the role

Lightfield is looking for a Staff Engineer to be one of the most senior technical contributors on the engineering team, driving the architecture and execution of the backend systems that power our core product.
Since emerging from private beta, Lightfield has seen rapid adoption - hundreds of businesses signing up each week, including larger teams relying on the product in production-critical workflows.

Lead the architecture and execution of Lightfield's most critical backend work streams - API platform, core data model, and systems that underpin new product capabilities
Partner with co-founders and product leadership to translate product direction into backend architecture decisions
Lead complex projects end-to-end - for example, taking custom objects from data model → migrations → query patterns → API ergonomics
Own the abstractions that the broader engineering team builds on top of
Raise the bar through design leadership, code review, and technical mentorship

Explore and ship agentic capabilities that require safe sandbox code execution (isolation, resource limits, auditability, security guardrails)
Contribute to hiring as the team grows - helping identify and close strong technical talent
8+ years of experience building and scaling backend systems, with meaningful time spent in technical leadership roles (tech lead, staff engineer, or equivalent)
You've led large, ambiguous projects end-to-end - defined the approach, sequenced the work across multiple engineers, and driven execution through to delivery
Strong experience with relational databases (Postgres preferred) - you understand query optimization, indexing strategy, and the tradeoffs involved in scaling a database-backed application
You've built for multi-tenant SaaS at scale and understand isolation, data growth, and performance tradeoffs
You have strong product instincts - you care about why something is being built, not just how, and you prioritize based on customer impact
Comfortable in a fast-moving, early-stage environment where the team is small, the scope is large, and you're expected to operate with significant autonomy

Meaningful early equity
Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
3 weeks of PTO
11 paid company holidays + we enjoy a winter holiday break
3 months of paid family leave
Other perks include: commuter and lunch stipend
Design and ship customer-defined CRM schema (custom fields, custom objects, flexible relationships) without sacrificing query performance or clean APIs

fast, intelligent, and genuinely helpful.
We are backed by Greylock, Lightspeed, and Coatue, and our founders previously built Tome, a generative AI presentation product used by over 25 million people.
Before Lightfield, our team worked on Llama, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, Google, and Salesforce.
You've owned the architecture of significant product-facing systems - not just infrastructure, but the backend that drives what customers experience

This listing is sourced directly from Lightfield's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.