Sofware Engineer, Backend (Staff)

Lightfield; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Early equity

Health insurance

3 weeks PTO

11 holidays + winter break

Family leave

Remote Wednesdays

Team events and offsites

401k

Commuter and lunch stipend

Job summary

Lightfield is hiring a Staff Engineer to lead backend architecture for the core product. You will drive API platform, data modeling, and multi-tenant design in a fast-growing, AI-native CRM backend.

The role emphasizes technical leadership, architecture ownership, and collaboration with founders and product leadership to deliver scalable, secure systems. You will shape foundational back-end decisions, ensure low-latency APIs, and mentor engineers while expanding the product surface area with new

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and scaling backend systems with leadership experience.
• Owned architecture of significant product-facing systems.
• Led large, ambiguous projects end-to-end.
• Strong experience with relational databases, PostgreSQL preferred.
• Designed APIs or platform-level systems used by engineers and external customers.
• Built for multi-tenant SaaS with isolation and performance balance.
• Strong product instincts focused on customer impact.
• Mentored engineers and contributed to design/review processes.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and execution of API platform, core data model, and backend systems.
• Scale the API platform with multi-tenant isolation, versioning, rate limits, and latency goals.
• Translate product direction into backend architecture decisions with leadership.
• Explore and ship sandboxed, agentic capabilities with security guardrails.
• Design and ship CRM schema for customers with performance in mind.
• Own abstractions that empower the broader engineering team.
• Drive design reviews and technical mentorship across the team.

Skills

Backend architecture

PostgreSQL

API design

Multi-tenant SaaS

Technical leadership

Job description

About Lightfield

Lightfield is an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings. It captures every interaction and turns it into organized context: accounts, tasks, follow-ups, and insights, so nothing slips through the cracks.

We’re rethinking CRM from first principles. Instead of forcing teams to maintain rigid systems, Lightfield learns from how companies actually work, adapting, automating, and surfacing the insight that drives growth. We’re building the CRM platform we always wished existed: 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.

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. The product surface area is expanding quickly: we're building an external API platform, shipping new AI-driven capabilities, and designing the data model and system architecture to support increasingly complex customer workflows.

You’ll work primarily in a Postgres-backed, multi-tenant backend (Node/TypeScript on AWS) where API design and data architecture directly shape the product experience.

What you'll do

• 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

• Scale our API platform: multi-tenant isolation, versioning, rate limits/quotas, idempotency, and measurable latency/throughput goals

• Partner with co-founders and product leadership to translate product direction into backend architecture decisions

• Explore and ship agentic capabilities that require safe sandbox code execution (isolation, resource limits, auditability, security guardrails)

• Design and ship customer-defined CRM schema (custom fields, custom objects, flexible relationships) without sacrificing query performance or clean APIs

• 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

• Contribute to hiring as the team grows - helping identify and close strong technical talent

Who you are

• 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 owned the architecture of significant product-facing systems - not just infrastructure, but the backend that drives what customers experience

• 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 designed and shipped APIs or platform-level systems that other engineers and external customers build on (versioning, auth, rate limits, backward compatibility)

• 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

• You make the engineers around you better through the quality of your technical judgment and your willingness to engage deeply in design and code review

• 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

Why this role

Most backend roles at this stage are about keeping things running. This one is about shaping what gets built. Lightfield's product ambitions are outpacing the current team's capacity to design and execute the backend systems behind them - the API platform, the data architecture, the systems that power new AI-driven capabilities. This is a chance to be one of the most influential engineers at a company with genuine traction, a strong team, and hard problems that are driven by product growth rather than technical debt. Your judgment will shape the product, not just the infrastructure.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive salary

• 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

• Wednesdays work from home

• Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats

• 401k plan

• Other perks include: commuter and lunch stipend