Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

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 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