Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

About the role

Lightfield is looking for a Staff Engineer to be one of the most senior technical contributors on the engineering team, driving the architecture and execution of the backend systems that power our core product. Since emerging from private beta, Lightfield has seen rapid adoption - hundreds of businesses signing up each week, including larger teams relying on the product in production-critical workflows. The product surface area is expanding quickly: we're building an external API platform, shipping new AI-driven capabilities, and designing the data model and system architecture to support increasingly complex customer workflows. You'll work primarily in a Postgres-backed, multi-tenant backend (Node/TypeScript on AWS) where API design and data architecture directly shape the product experience. This is not a reliability or platform-focused role - it's a product-facing technical leadership role. You'll be in the room shaping what gets built, then leading the architecture and execution of the most important backend work streams. You'll partner closely with the co-founders and product leadership to translate product ambition into technical strategy, and you'll raise the bar for the engineering team through the quality of your work and your judgment. Scalability and performance are part of the job, but the pitch is the opportunity to shape the product at a foundational level as one of the earliest senior engineers on the team.