Staff Engineer (Backend Systems)

• You've designed and shipped APIs or platform-level systems that other engineers and external customers build on (versioning, auth, rate limits, backward compatibility)
• 8+ years of experience building and scaling backend systems, with meaningful time spent in technical leadership roles (tech lead, staff engineer, or equivalent)
• 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
• You've owned the architecture of significant product-facing systems - not just infrastructure, but the backend that drives what customers experience
• You’ve built for multi-tenant SaaS at scale and understand isolation, data growth, and performance tradeoffs
• 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
• You've led large, ambiguous projects end-to-end - defined the approach, sequenced the work across multiple engineers, and driven execution through to delivery
• You have strong product instincts - you care about why something is being built, not just how, and you prioritize based on customer impact
• Strong experience with relational databases (Postgres preferred) - you understand query optimization, indexing strategy, and the tradeoffs involved in scaling a database-backed application

Key responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and execution of Lightfield's most critical backend work streams, including the API platform, core data model, and systems that underpin new product capabilities.
• Scale the API platform by implementing 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, ensuring alignment with business goals.