Staff Engineer, Backend Systems
Lightfield7 months ago
Base Salary
$150k - $300k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture and execution of critical backend work streams covering the API platform, core data model, and systems for new product capabilities.
- Scale the API platform through multi-tenant isolation, versioning, rate limits and quotas, idempotency, and measurable latency and throughput goals.
- Partner with co-founders and product leadership to translate product direction into backend architecture decisions.
- Explore and ship agentic capabilities involving safe sandbox code execution, isolation, resource limits, auditability, and security guardrails.
- Design and ship customer-defined CRM schemas with custom fields, custom objects, and flexible relationships while preserving query performance and clean APIs.
- Lead complex projects from data modeling and migrations through query patterns and API ergonomics.
- Own abstractions used by the broader engineering team, raise engineering quality through design leadership and code review, mentor engineers, and contribute to hiring.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience building and scaling backend systems, including meaningful technical leadership experience.
- Experience owning the architecture of significant product-facing systems and leading large, ambiguous projects end to end.
- Strong relational database experience, preferably with Postgres, including query optimization, indexing, and database scaling tradeoffs.
- Experience designing and shipping APIs or platform systems used by engineers and external customers, including versioning, authentication, rate limits, and backward compatibility.
- Experience building multi-tenant SaaS at scale and understanding isolation, data growth, and performance tradeoffs.
- Strong product judgment, technical decision-making, design and code review skills, autonomy, and comfort in an early-stage environment.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and meaningful early equity are offered.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance are provided.
- Three weeks of paid time off, 11 paid company holidays, and a winter holiday break are provided.
- Three months of paid family leave are provided.
- Wednesdays are work-from-home days.
- The company offers team dinners, events, offsites, retreats, a 401(k) plan, and commuter and lunch stipends.
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.