Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

ABOUT LIGHTFIELD Lightfield is an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings. It captures every interaction and turns it into organized context: accounts, tasks, follow-ups, and insights, so nothing slips through the cracks. We’re rethinking CRM from first principles. Instead of forcing teams to maintain rigid systems, Lightfield learns from how companies actually work, adapting, automating, and surfacing the insight that drives growth. We’re building the CRM platform we always wished existed: fast, intelligent, and genuinely helpful. We are backed by Greylock, Lightspeed, and Coatue, and our founders previously built Tome, a generative AI presentation product used by over 25 million people. Before Lightfield, our team worked on Llama, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, Google, and Salesforce. ABOUT THE ROLE 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. WHAT YOU'LL DO - 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 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 t