Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

Lightfield

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Health insurance

3 weeks of PTO

401k plan

Family leave

Job summary

A tech startup in AI software is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the architecture and execution of backend systems powering its rapidly growing product. This crucial role involves designing APIs and managing databases while ensuring scalability and performance. The ideal candidate has significant experience with backend architecture, technical leadership, and a customer-focused approach. Key benefits include competitive salary, equity, health insurance, and generous PTO. Join a dynamic team where your judgment will influence core product decisions.

Qualifications

8+ years of experience building and scaling backend systems.
Experience in technical leadership roles.
Strong experience with relational databases and query optimization.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture and execution of the API platform.
Scale multi-tenant backend systems.
Partner with co-founders to translate product direction into backend architecture.

Skills

Backend system architecture

Relational databases (Postgres)

API design and shipping

Technical mentorship

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.

This is not a reliability or platform‑focused role - it's a product‑facing technical leadership role. You'll be in the room shaping what gets built, then leading the architecture and execution of the most important backend work streams. You'll partner closely with the co‑founders and product leadership to translate product ambition into technical strategy, and you'll raise the bar for the engineering team through the quality of your work and your judgment. Scalability and performance are part of the job, but the pitch is the opportunity to shape the product at a foundational level as one of the earliest senior engineers on the team.

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