Software Engineer, Backend (Staff+)
Lightfield8 months ago
Base Salary
$180k - $300k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own core product capabilities end to end, from customer requirements and behavioral semantics through data modeling, APIs, migrations, rollout, and operation.
- Design shared abstractions for the product UI, public APIs, agents, automations, and internal engineering teams.
- Evolve schema-flexible, graph-shaped data models on Postgres with runtime-defined objects, attributes, relationships, and changing values.
- Build authorization, history, event propagation, durable execution, and metering systems that are visible to customers.
- Develop and optimize high-throughput Node.js services, Postgres query paths, APIs, queues, and background jobs.
- Debug production behavior across application code, database execution, distributed workflows, and observability data.
- Provide design leadership, code review, operational ownership, and technical judgment, sometimes leading a small pod.
Requirements
- At least 7 years of experience.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and substantial experience building backend systems.
- A record of owning significant product-facing systems or ambiguous technical projects from design through production.
- Strong judgment regarding data models, APIs, system boundaries, migrations, and incremental rollout.
- Experience operating systems with meaningful reliability, latency, throughput, and correctness requirements.
- Comfort debugging across multiple layers of the stack when product and system behavior diverge.
- Product orientation, practical tradeoff judgment, clear communication, and the ability to create alignment without formal authority.
- Helpful experience includes Node.js or similar high-throughput services, Postgres performance tuning and multi-tenant modeling, APIs and distributed systems, observability and incident response, and high-growth product environments.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and meaningful early equity.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
- Three weeks of paid time off, 11 paid company holidays, and a winter holiday break.
- Three months of paid family leave.
- 401(k) plan.
- Commuter and lunch stipends.
- Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats.
- Based in San Francisco or Cambridge; Wednesdays work from home.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Lightfield
Lightfield builds an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from a company’s email, calendars, and meetings to create accounts, tasks, and follow-ups. It sells a cloud subscription to sales and go-to-market teams seeking automated capture and context. Headquartered in San Francisco, it is privately held, backed by Greylock, Lightspeed, and Coatue, and reports adoption by 5,000+ companies since launch.