Software Engineer, Backend (Staff+)

The role

You will own core product capabilities from requirement to production. You will design shared abstractions, evolve a schema-flexible data model on Postgres, and build systems for authorization, history, and durable execution.

What you will do

• Own core product capabilities end to end
• Design shared abstractions for UI, public API, agents, and automations
• Evolve a schema-flexible, graph-shaped data model on Postgres
• Build systems for authorization, history, event propagation, durable execution, and metering
• Partner with product engineers, leadership, and customers
• Make Node.js services, Postgres query paths, APIs, queues, and background jobs fast and reliable
• Debug production behavior across application code, database execution, and distributed workflows
• Decide between focused fixes and new architectural changes
• Raise the technical bar through design leadership and code review

Required qualifications

• 7+ years experience
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and substantial experience building backend systems
• A record of owning significant product-facing systems or ambiguous technical projects from design through production
• Strong judgment about data models, APIs, system boundaries, migrations, and incremental rollout
• Experience operating systems with real reliability, latency, throughput, and correctness requirements
• Comfort debugging across multiple layers of the stack
• Product orientation
• The ability to make practical tradeoffs, communicate clearly, and create alignment without relying on formal authority

Nice to have

• Node.js or similar high-throughput service environments
• Postgres performance tuning, query planning, indexing, transaction design, or multi-tenant data modeling
• APIs, queues, workflow systems, background jobs, and distributed systems
• Observability, incident response, service ownership, and production debugging
• Experience in a high-growth product environment

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful early equity
• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
• 3 weeks of PTO
• 11 paid company holidays plus a winter holiday break
• 3 months of paid family leave
• Wednesdays work from home
• Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats
• 401k plan
• Commuter and lunch stipend

About the company

Lightfield is reimagining CRM as a world model of a business. The team brings experience from Llama, Instagram, Google, and Salesforce.