Software Engineer (Infrastructure (Early Career)

Tome; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

PTO

Health insurance

Holidays

Family leave

Work from home Wednesdays

401k

Commuter stipend

Job summary

Tome in Cambridge is seeking a systems-focused engineer to own database-backed workloads across scheduling, permissions, and distributed systems. You’ll work on a schema-flexible data model using Postgres, design performant data-access patterns, and help keep customer data fast and consistent.

This role emphasizes hypothesis-driven development, instrumentation, production debugging, and close code review. You’ll collaborate with senior infra engineers in Cambridge and contribute to end-to-end

Responsibilities

• Design and review distributed systems and data models.
• Debug production behavior and instrument systems.
• Own subsystems end-to-end and ship production work early.
• Collaborate with site leads and infrastructure engineers in Cambridge.

Skills

Distributed systems

Data modeling

Query optimization

Instrumentation

Code review

Incident response

Tools

PostgreSQL

SQL

Job description

• If you want to be part of the AI wave and are drawn to the systems challenges of a product used by both people and agents, this role is for you
• Lightfield’s infrastructure supports human-interactive requests, agent-driven queries and actions, scheduled agents, and continuous ingestion of email, calendar, and meeting data
• Based in our Cambridge office, you’ll work on the databases, scheduling, permissions, and distributed systems that keep these workloads fast, isolated, and reliable as they share the same underlying customer data
• The work is not research, but many of the same habits matter: forming hypotheses, reading unfamiliar systems deeply, designing careful experiments, and explaining what the evidence shows
• You’ll use those habits on problems like these:
• Querying a schema-flexible data model. Customers define their own object types, fields, and relationships at runtime, while the underlying data is stored in Postgres. We work on query planning, indexing, and data-access patterns that keep those records fast to filter and aggregate as datasets grow
• Record-level permissions across relationships. Access can come from ownership, direct grants, group membership, or inheritance from another record. We need a permissions model that evaluates those paths efficiently and produces the same answer across the application, API, search, dashboards, and agents
• Balancing real-time and batch workloads. Search indexing competes with historical imports and backfills for shared database and queue capacity. We use concurrency controls, prioritization, and backpressure to keep real-time updates moving while still processing large batches
• You’ll design and review systems, debug production behavior, and gradually take full ownership of one or more subsystems. You’ll ship production work early with close design and code review, then take on increasingly open-ended projects as you demonstrate readiness
• You’d join a small, systems-focused engineering group in our new Kendall Square office early enough to help establish how it works, alongside a site lead who is one of our most senior infrastructure engineers
• Ship production work early with close design and code review, then grow into end-to-end ownership of a system
• Investigate systems methodically: reproduce behavior, add instrumentation, form a hypothesis, and test it against production evidence
• Work on query performance, data modeling, permissions, scheduling, and keeping customer-facing data fresh
• Debug real production issues across application code, databases, queues, and infrastructure
• Learn how production systems are designed and operated through code review, incident response, and owning what you ship
• Most new grad roles put you several layers away from the systems that matter. This one doesn’t. You’ll see how decisions about data models, query plans, permissions, and scheduling affect real customers, while working closely with experienced infrastructure engineers. If you want to turn academic depth into production judgment and do serious systems work without leaving Cambridge, this is that job

Benefits

• Meaningful early equity
• 3 weeks of PTO
• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
• 11 paid company holidays + we enjoy a winter holiday break
• 3 months of paid family leave
• Wednesdays work from home
• Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats
• 401k plan
• Other perks include: commuter and lunch stipend