Staff Engineer, Lightfield
Backend Systems
$150-300k
+ Equity
4 days a week in office
AI-native natural language CRM
Be an early applicant
AI-native natural language CRM
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$150-300k
+ Equity
4 days a week in office
21-100 employees
Company mission
To help founders build better businesses.
Role
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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
- 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
Our take
A major pitfall of CRM systems is the amount of admin required to maintain them. Follow up drafting, note logging and field updating mean that customers are always playing catch up to maintain the very system built to keep them on top of their customer relationships. Lightfield was designed to do this work itself, utilising AI-native automation to build a picture of your customer base.
Lightfield’s AI agents can contextualise customer interactions and use this to develop unique sales pipelines and meeting preparation, meaning that its users do less admin and close more deals. Tools on the Lightfield platform include a pipeline generation tool for time-strapped start-ups, a sales assistant for meeting memos and log updating and data capture for self-updating CRMs. All this speaks to a product that speaks to a culture of bogged-down, high-growth companies lacking the time to manage their growing client base.
Spun out from the co-founders' previous pitch-presentation company Tome, Lightfield released a migration tool in 2026, further incentivising businesses to take up its platform. With plenty of experience from its founding team, Lightfield is itself on the right track for high growth.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Feb 2023
$43m
SERIES B
Mar 2022
$32.3m
LATE VC
Total funding: $107.6m
Company benefits
- Meaningful early equity
- Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
- 3 weeks of PTO
- 11 paid company holidays + we enjoy a winter holiday break
- 3 months of paid family leave
- Wednesdays work from home
- Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats
- 401k plan
- Other perks include: commuter and lunch stipend
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Henri Liriani
(Co-Founder)Previously served as Head of Product (Messenger Human Interfaces) for Facebook. Co-founded Craaave.
Keith Peiris
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously acted as Head of Product for Citizen, as Messaging & Camera AR Product Lead for Instagram, and as Manager of Product Management for Facebook.
Salary benchmarks
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