Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer — Scale & Analytics

Lightfield; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful early equity

Health insurance (medical, dental, vis

3 weeks PTO

11 paid company holidays

3 months paid family leave

Wednesdays work from home

Regular team dinners & retreats

401k plan

Commuter and lunch stipend

Job summary

Lightfield is hiring a Staff-level Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure, to scale the analytics backbone behind customer dashboards and data products. You’ll work across backend data systems, implementing schema-flexible models and reliable ingestion paths while ensuring data freshness and auditability for billions of monthly queries.

You’ll partner with product and engineering teams, own production data systems, and shape the architecture as Lightfield grows toward a broader customer base.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience owning production data systems with real user-facing impact.
• Comfort debugging across multiple layers of the stack.
• Good judgment balancing tactical fixes with durable platform changes.
• Product orientation: focus on customer impact and engineering velocity.
• Clear communication, strong ownership, and a bias toward practical tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Scale the analytics engine behind customer-facing dashboards, tackling query performance under row-level security, workload isolation, read architecture, and observability as data volume grows.
• Design the ingestion paths, event models, schemas, and query patterns that move data from transactional writes into search, dashboards, and history—with clear guarantees around freshness, correctness, replay, and failure recovery.
• Evolve our schema-flexible, graph-shaped data model so customer-defined objects, attributes, and relationships remain fast to query as their size and complexity grow.
• Build the foundations for historical reporting and auditability, including attribute versioning, relationship history, and change capture.
• Build reliable data systems for usage metering, pipeline generation, and AI evaluation, where errors have direct customer, product, or financial consequences.
• Decide when our existing architecture remains the right foundation and when new analytical, streaming, or workflow systems earn their added complexity.
• Set the technical direction, abstractions, ownership boundaries, and engineering practices for data systems as the company grows.

Skills

Strong software engineering

Production data systems

Debugging across stack

Tactical vs durable decisions

Product orientation

Clear communication & ownership

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Spark

Iceberg

ClickHouse

OLAP

Data Warehouses

Event pipelines

APIs

Queues

Workflow systems

Distributed systems

Observability

Incident response

Service ownership

Production debugging

Job description

Lightfield is hiring a Staff-level Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure, to scale the analytics backbone behind customer dashboards and data products. You’ll work across backend data systems, implementing schema-flexible models and reliable ingestion paths while ensuring data freshness and auditability for billions of monthly queries.

You’ll partner with product and engineering teams, own production data systems, and shape the architecture as Lightfield grows toward a broader customer base.