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.

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.

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

Lightfield is an AI-native CRM built for the modern era, designed to replace legacy tools like Salesforce and HubSpot by assembling itself automatically from a team's email, calendar, and meetings. Founded with the mission to become the definitive system of record for the AI era — just as Salesforce defined the cloud era — Lightfield is rethinking CRM from first principles: instead of forcing teams into rigid systems, it learns from how companies actually work, adapting, automating, and surfacing insights that drive growth. The company is backed by top-tier investors including Greylock, Lightspeed, and Coatue, and its founders previously built Tome, a generative AI presentation product used by over 25 million people. The team brings deep pedigree from Llama, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, Google, and Salesforce. Traction has been exceptional: over 3,000 companies have signed up for the product, with more than 100 new sign-ups every week and roughly 30 converting to paying customers weekly. Customers include notable names like Substack and Distill. Lightfield operates a dual go-to-market motion — a high-velocity self-serve PLG funnel paired with a direct sales motion targeting Series A/B startups — and is scaling rapidly with plans to grow its sales team from 1 to 7 AEs by end of year. The culture is high-intensity, mission-driven, and in-office four days a week, attracting missionaries over mercenaries who are genuinely excited about building a category-defining company.

Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

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