Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

Lightfield•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

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. This is not a reliability or platform-focused role - it's a product-facing technical leadership role. You'll be in the room shaping what gets built, then leading the architecture and execution of the most important backend work streams. You'll partner closely with the co-founders and product leadership to translate product ambition into technical strategy, and you'll raise the bar for the engineering team through the quality of your work and your judgment. Scalability and performance are part of the job, but the pitch is the opportunity to shape the product at a foundational level as one of the earliest senior engineers on the team.

Requirements

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

Responsibilities

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