About the role
About Caplight
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.
About the role
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.