Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure (Staff) at Lightfield
San Francisco, CA
$180,000–$300,000
Aug 2, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A staff-level data infrastructure engineer role at an early-stage AI-native CRM startup, responsible for scaling and evolving the company's data systems — including a high-throughput Postgres fleet, Redis-backed job platform, and customer-facing analytics engine. The work spans change data capture, event modeling, schema design, query performance, and the boundary between transactional and analytical workloads, with direct ownership over technical direction as the company grows. Suits someone who thrives on high-volume data systems and pragmatic architecture decisions close to production.
Staff level · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
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Posted 3 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
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How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 15 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database architects). range 4–20
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
What the occupation pays Median $179,727 (middle half $166,748–$216,836).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 4, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role is explicitly titled 'Staff' and the posting describes org-wide technical direction-setting across data systems, consistent with a Staff-level scope — not merely a Senior engineer with a long tenure requirement.
SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role involves significant data architecture and pipeline design (15-1243 Database Architects) but also substantial software engineering — building ingestion paths, event models, and production systems — which could support 15-1252 Software Developers. 15-1243 was chosen because schema design, query performance, CDC, and data modeling are the explicit primary focus.
The primary CBSA listed is San Francisco (HQ); the posting also offers a Cambridge, MA location (Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH CBSA 14460) at a new Kendall Square site. Only one CBSA can be captured here; San Francisco is listed first and described as the main HQ.
Postgres, Redis, Typesense, and BullMQ are the current production stack described throughout the posting's narrative sections. They are marked required because the role explicitly involves scaling and evolving these specific systems — not merely as background stack color.
ClickHouse, Kafka, Flink, Spark, and Iceberg appear under the 'Helpful experience' section with the explicit caveat 'You do not need all of these,' so they are listed as preferred.
No compensation figures are provided beyond 'competitive salary' and equity.
The role is in-office (San Francisco HQ or Cambridge Kendall Square); Wednesdays WFH is mentioned as a perk but the role is not fully remote.
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