Staff Backend Engineer: API Platform, Data Architecture & Equity

Lightfield; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; 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

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