Lightfield
Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure (Staff+)
$180K–$300K
HQ: San Francisco +1 · On-site · Staff · Full-time · Posted Aug 3, 2026
- Location
- HQ: San Francisco
Cambridge, MA - Experience
- 7+ years experience.
About the job
Build and lead the evolution of Lightfield’s data infrastructure, moving and serving product data reliably across analytics, search, history, and AI evaluation systems.
What you'll do
- Scale customer-facing analytics, improving query performance, workload isolation, read architecture, and observability.
- Design and evolve ingestion paths, event models, schemas, and data systems with guarantees for freshness, correctness, replay, and recovery.
- Set technical direction for data architecture, abstractions, ownership boundaries, and engineering practices.
What they ask for
- Strong software engineering fundamentals.
- Experience owning production data systems where query plans, replication lag, backfills, freshness, schema evolution, or correctness affected users.
- Comfort debugging across multiple layers of the stack.
- Good judgment on tactical fixes versus durable platform or architecture changes.
Nice to have
- Experience with ClickHouse, OLAP systems, event pipelines, data warehouses, or analytical infrastructure.
- Experience with Kafka, Flink, Spark, Iceberg, or similar streaming and lakehouse systems.
Pay
USD $180K – $300K base salary
Tools
Postgres, Redis, Typesense, BullMQ, ClickHouse, Kafka, Flink, Spark
AI focus
Build evaluation data infrastructure for AI agents and reliable data systems for pipeline-generation products; helpful experience includes data for ML/AI systems such as enrichment pipelines, eval harnesses, or data-quality tooling.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative