Senior Data & AI Platform Engineer

Apply; Los Angeles, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Lightspark is building the Money Grid and modern, open financial infrastructure to make payments accessible and instant worldwide. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Data & AI team to expand Lighthouse into a trusted data and AI layer used across Finance, Sales Ops, and Compliance.

You will own the internal AI platform, integrate with teams, and extend our data pipelines while ensuring reliability and scalability in a startup environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience shipping and maintaining production systems across data engineering, ML engineering, or backend/full-stack roles.
• You have built an internal platform or workflow system adopted by other teams, not just features.
• You've worked with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, and MCP in production, beyond prompting.
• You write clean code in TypeScript/Node or Python and know how to use a cloud data warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks).
• You can sit with non-technical teams to understand their workflow and design a usable system.
• You thrive in a startup environment and can handle ambiguity.
• Experience in payments, crypto, or blockchain is a plus; relocation to LA is acceptable.

Responsibilities

• Build and own Lightspark's internal AI platform: agent harness, MCP servers, tool integrations, and sandboxed execution.
• Embed with Finance, Sales Ops, Compliance, and onboarding to replace manual processes with scalable systems.
• Extend data infrastructure alongside the Staff Data Engineer: DBT, BigQuery, orchestration, pipelines.
• Share ownership of monitoring, alerting, and data reliability for launches.
• Collaborate with Engineering to optimize developers' tooling and systems.

Skills

Production systems

TypeScript/Node

Python

LLM APIs

Agent frameworks

BigQuery/Snowflake/Databricks

Cross-functional collaboration

Startup environment

Payments/crypto experience

Job description

Lightspark is building the Money Grid and modern, open financial infrastructure to make payments accessible and instant worldwide. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Data & AI team to expand Lighthouse into a trusted data and AI layer used across Finance, Sales Ops, and Compliance.

You will own the internal AI platform, integrate with teams, and extend our data pipelines while ensuring reliability and scalability in a startup environment.