Caplight is building technology for the venture capital industry. The private markets currently run on fragmented data and manual workflows. Half the industry's deal flow lives in someone's notebook. That hasn't fundamentally changed in decades. We're changing it.
Today, Caplight combines proprietary data and research with an institutional marketplace for private company stock. Our marketplace features billions of dollars in live order volume for pre-IPO companies, and our datasets are relied on by many of the world's leading institutional investors. We're a small fast-moving team, looking to expand on our existing product to bring automation and agentic tooling to the whole VC industry.
This is a backend-leaning Staff Engineer role with two mandates.
The first is the platform itself. You'll own system design and architecture across our backend: the data models, service boundaries, and abstractions that everything else is built on. That includes the build-vs-buy calls. Part of this job is evaluating third-party technologies and libraries, deciding what earns a place in our stack, and knowing when to rip something out. When there's an ambiguous, high-stakes technical problem where getting it wrong would hurt the business, you own it.
The second mandate is the software factory. Most of our code is written by agents now, so the system that produces code matters as much as the systems running in production. That system is real infrastructure: agent harnesses, evals, CI, review tooling. It determines how fast we ship and how much we trust what shipped. One person here ships what used to take a team. That ratio is a direct function of this tooling, and you'll own pushing it further.
This is a role for someone who wants to build. You'll write code and own systems in production. But you'll also be expected to think past your own queue: to spot the gaps in our systems before they become problems, and to make the case for fixing them.
To be clear, this list is context, not a requirement. Agents write most of the code here, and an engineer with good judgment picks up a new stack in a week. We care whether you can tell good systems from bad ones, in any language.
Email [email protected] with your resume and a short note on why you're interested. If it looks like a fit, we'll do a short intro call, then a technical deep dive on something you've built, then a hands-on working session at our office. We move quickly, and if we're excited you'll hear from us within a couple of days.
Caplight (legal entity: Caplight Technologies, Inc.) is a fintech platform that brings data transparency and institutional-grade trading infrastructure to the private (pre-IPO) secondary market. Its core product, Caplight MarketPrice™, aggregates primary and secondary transaction data to generate daily price estimates for thousands of venture-backed private companies. The platform also provides a live trading marketplace connecting institutional buyers, sellers, and brokers, plus a company and investor database, CRM tooling, and an AI-powered sourcing engine for VC deal discovery. As of late 2025, the company has scaled to millions in ARR and is profitable.
Salary
$240,000 - $400,000
Equity
0.2% - 0.5%
Location
San Francisco, California
Experience
6+ years
Total raised
$10.0M
Last stage
Seed
Investors
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
Juan Pablo Villafuerte
Chief of Staff
Lemuel Araújo
Data Engineer
Luan Motta
Software Engineer
Maria Rabinovich
Head of Legal
Maui Simon
Business Development
Rusty McDonough
Business Development
Siddharth Somani
Business Development
William Pramono
Software Engineer
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.