Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure (Staff+)

The role

You will build the next generation of data systems and scale the analytics engine for customer-facing dashboards. The role involves designing ingestion paths, evolving a schema-flexible data model, and setting technical direction for data systems.

What you will do

• Scale the analytics engine behind customer-facing dashboards
• Design ingestion paths, event models, schemas, and query patterns
• Evolve the schema-flexible, graph-shaped data model
• Build foundations for historical reporting and auditability
• Build reliable data systems for usage metering, pipeline generation, and AI evaluation
• Decide when to use existing architecture or new analytical, streaming, or workflow systems
• Set technical direction, abstractions, ownership boundaries, and engineering practices

Required qualifications

• 7+ years experience
• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Experience owning production data systems where query plans, replication lag, backfills, data freshness, schema evolution, or data correctness had real user-facing consequences
• Comfort debugging across multiple layers of the stack
• Good judgment about when to make a tactical fix and when to invest in a more durable platform or architecture change
• Product orientation
• Clear communication
• Strong ownership
• A bias toward practical tradeoffs

Nice to have

• ClickHouse, OLAP systems, event pipelines, data warehouses, or analytical infrastructure
• Kafka, Flink, Spark, Iceberg, or similar streaming and lakehouse systems
• Postgres at scale, and the boundary between OLTP and OLAP systems
• APIs, queues, workflow systems, and distributed systems
• Observability, incident response, service ownership, and production debugging
• Data for ML/AI systems: enrichment pipelines, eval harnesses, or data-quality tooling
• 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 by learning from emails, meetings, and customer conversations. The team brings experience from Llama, Instagram, Google, and Salesforce.