Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure (Staff+)
Lightfield3 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 clear freshness, correctness, replay, and recovery guarantees.
- 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.
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience.
- 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.
- Ability to debug across multiple layers of the stack.
- Good judgment in balancing tactical fixes with durable platform or architecture investments.
- Product orientation and understanding of how data infrastructure decisions affect customers, users, and engineering velocity.
- Clear communication, strong ownership, and practical tradeoff judgment.
- Helpful experience includes ClickHouse, OLAP systems, event pipelines, data warehouses, analytical infrastructure, Kafka, Flink, Spark, Iceberg, Postgres at scale, OLTP/OLAP boundaries, APIs, queues, workflow systems, distributed systems, observability, incident response, service ownership, production debugging, and data systems for ML/AI.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and meaningful early equity.
- Medical, dental, and vision health insurance.
- Three weeks of PTO, 11 paid company holidays, and a winter holiday break.
- Three months of paid family leave.
- Wednesdays work from home.
- Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats.
- 401k plan, commuter stipend, and lunch stipend.
- Role based in San Francisco or Cambridge.
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.