Infrastructure Engineer — Real-Time Systems & Databases

Lightfield; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful early equity

Health insurance

3 weeks of PTO

11 paid company holidays + winter hols

3 months paid family leave

Wednesdays work from home

Team dinners and retreats

401k plan

Commuter and lunch stipend

Job summary

Lightfield, an AI-native CRM based in Cambridge, MA, is seeking an infrastructure-focused engineer to help design and operate data-intensive subsystems across databases, scheduling, and permissions. The role emphasizes hypothesis-driven debugging, production instrumentation, and close collaboration with senior engineers in Kendall Square.

You’ll work on a schema-flexible data model stored in Postgres, implement efficient data-access patterns, and balance real-time vs batch workloads while

Qualifications

• Strong computer science fundamentals and a degree in CS or a related field.
• Depth somewhere systems-shaped: OS, databases, distributed systems, security, or related project.
• Curiosity about how things actually work and understanding query planners.
• Ownership: you finish things and ensure stability after shipping.
• Clear communication about technical decisions and tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• 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 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.

Skills

CS Fundamentals

Systems depth

Curiosity

Ownership

Communication

Education

CS degree or related field

Tools

PostgreSQL

Job description

Lightfield, an AI-native CRM based in Cambridge, MA, is seeking an infrastructure-focused engineer to help design and operate data-intensive subsystems across databases, scheduling, and permissions. The role emphasizes hypothesis-driven debugging, production instrumentation, and close collaboration with senior engineers in Kendall Square.

You’ll work on a schema-flexible data model stored in Postgres, implement efficient data-access patterns, and balance real-time vs batch workloads while