Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer - Scale Analytics & Systems

Lightfield; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity

Health insurance

3 weeks PTO

11 holidays

Job summary

Lightfield is building its data infrastructure for a fast-growing AI-driven CRM. You will work from Cambridge or San Francisco, shaping the next generation of data systems that power customer dashboards, billing, and analytics.

This role sits at the intersection of product and production data, delivering scalable, reliable data foundations. The team emphasizes schema-flexible modeling, data accuracy, and performance at scale, with direct impact on customers and product velocity.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience owning production data systems where query plans, replication lag, backfills, data freshness, schema evolution, or data correctness had real user-facing consequences.
• Comfort debugging across multiple layers of the stack.
• Good judgment about when to make a tactical fix and when to invest in a more durable platform or architecture change.
• Product orientation: you care about how data infrastructure decisions affect customers, users, and engineering velocity.

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… move data from transactional writes into search, dashboards, and history—with guarantees around freshness and replay.
• Evolve the schema-flexible, graph-shaped data model so customer-defined objects, attributes, and relationships remain fast to query as size grows.
• Build foundations for historical reporting and auditability, including attribute versioning and relationship history.
• Build reliable data systems for usage metering, pipeline generation, and AI evaluation with customer impact.
• Decide when to keep existing architecture or adopt new analytical, streaming, or workflow systems.

Skills

Strong software engineering

Production data systems

Query performance

Schema design

Observability

Tools

Postgres

Redis

Typesense

BullMQ

Job description

Lightfield is building its data infrastructure for a fast-growing AI-driven CRM. You will work from Cambridge or San Francisco, shaping the next generation of data systems that power customer dashboards, billing, and analytics.

This role sits at the intersection of product and production data, delivering scalable, reliable data foundations. The team emphasizes schema-flexible modeling, data accuracy, and performance at scale, with direct impact on customers and product velocity.