Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure (Staff)
Lightfield2 months ago
Base Salary
$180k - $300k/yr
Responsibilities
- Scale the analytics engine behind customer-facing dashboards, including query performance, row-level security, workload isolation, read architecture, and observability.
- Design ingestion paths, event models, schemas, and query patterns connecting transactional writes to search, dashboards, and historical data with guarantees for freshness, correctness, replay, and failure recovery.
- Evolve the schema-flexible, graph-shaped data model for customer-defined objects, attributes, and relationships.
- Build historical reporting, auditability, attribute versioning, relationship history, and change-capture foundations.
- Build reliable data systems for usage metering, pipeline generation, and AI evaluation.
- Determine when to retain the existing architecture and when to introduce analytical, streaming, or workflow systems.
- Set technical direction, abstractions, ownership boundaries, and engineering practices for data systems.
- Lead projects including analytics serving, zero-downtime Typesense schema migrations, consumption-billing metering, historical and audit data modeling, and AI-agent evaluation infrastructure.
Requirements
- Strong software engineering fundamentals are required.
- Experience owning production data systems with user-facing consequences related to query plans, replication lag, backfills, data freshness, schema evolution, or data correctness is required.
- Candidates should be comfortable debugging across multiple layers of the stack and making practical architecture tradeoffs.
- Product orientation, clear communication, strong ownership, and a bias toward practical tradeoffs are expected.
- Helpful experience includes ClickHouse, OLAP systems, event pipelines, data warehouses, analytical infrastructure, Kafka, Flink, Spark, Iceberg, streaming or lakehouse systems, Postgres at scale, OLTP/OLAP boundaries, APIs, queues, workflow systems, distributed systems, observability, incident response, service ownership, production debugging, and data systems for ML or AI.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and meaningful early equity are offered.
- Medical, dental, and vision health 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 and a 401(k) plan are provided.
- The role is based in San Francisco or Cambridge, with Wednesdays working from home.
- Additional perks include commuter and lunch stipends, team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats.
Tech Stack
Categories
BackendData Engineering
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.