Software Engineer, Lightfield
Infrastructure (Early Career)
$150-170k
Offers Equity
Office located in Cambridge, MA
AI-native natural language CRM
Posted today
AI-native natural language CRM
21-100 employees
Posted today
$150-170k
Offers Equity
Office located in Cambridge, MA
21-100 employees
Company mission
To help founders build better businesses.
Role
Who you are
- Strong computer science fundamentals and a degree in CS or a related field
- Depth somewhere systems-shaped: research experience, coursework you went deep on (operating systems, databases, distributed systems, security), a systems-flavored internship, or a project you can talk about for an hour
- Curiosity about how things actually work. You'd rather understand the query planner than work around it
- Ownership: you finish things, and you care that they keep working after you ship them
- Clear communication about technical decisions and tradeoffs
What the job involves
- If you want to be part of the AI wave and are drawn to the systems challenges of a product used by both people and agents, this role is for you
- Lightfield's infrastructure supports human-interactive requests, agent-driven queries and actions, scheduled agents, and continuous ingestion of email, calendar, and meeting data
- Based in our Cambridge office, you'll work on the databases, scheduling, permissions, and distributed systems that keep these workloads fast, isolated, and reliable as they share the same underlying customer data
- The work is not research, but many of the same habits matter: forming hypotheses, reading unfamiliar systems deeply, designing careful experiments, and explaining what the evidence shows
- You'll use those habits on problems like these:
- Querying a schema-flexible data model. Customers define their own object types, fields, and relationships at runtime, while the underlying data is stored in Postgres. We work on query planning, indexing, and data-access patterns that keep those records fast to filter and aggregate as datasets grow
- Record-level permissions across relationships. Access can come from ownership, direct grants, group membership, or inheritance from another record. We need a permissions model that evaluates those paths efficiently and produces the same answer across the application, API, search, dashboards, and agents
- Balancing real-time and batch workloads. Search indexing competes with historical imports and backfills for shared database and queue capacity. We use concurrency controls, prioritization, and backpressure to keep real-time updates moving while still processing large batches
- You'll design and review systems, debug production behavior, and gradually take full ownership of one or more subsystems. You'll ship production work early with close design and code review, then take on increasingly open-ended projects as you demonstrate readiness
- You'd join a small, systems-focused engineering group in our new Kendall Square office early enough to help establish how it works, alongside a site lead who is one of our most senior infrastructure engineers
- Ship production work early with close design and code review, then grow into end-to-end ownership of a system
- Investigate systems methodically: reproduce behavior, add instrumentation, form a hypothesis, and test it against production evidence
- Work on query performance, data modeling, permissions, scheduling, and keeping customer-facing data fresh
- Debug real production issues across application code, databases, queues, and infrastructure
- Learn how production systems are designed and operated through code review, incident response, and owning what you ship
- Most new grad roles put you several layers away from the systems that matter. This one doesn't. You'll see how decisions about data models, query plans, permissions, and scheduling affect real customers, while working closely with experienced infrastructure engineers. If you want to turn academic depth into production judgment and do serious systems work without leaving Cambridge, this is that job
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.
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