Technical Lead, Data Systems & Infrastructure

HQ: San Francisco on site Until 8/22/2026 First posted April 9, 2025 Last posted April 9, 2025
Job description

About Lightfield

Lightfield is a new kind of CRM.

It's a collaborative system for founders to find, understand, and serve customers faster than anything before it.

It captures every customer interaction, generates and performs followup actions, and answers questions about your go-to-market using knowledge obtained in real time.

Our system is tuned and customized by a team of experienced sellers, engineers, and researchers. Many of us worked on large-scale products including Llama, Messenger, Instagram, Pinterest, and Linkedin before this.

Lightfield.app

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced, creative, and versatile technical leader to define and scale the data infrastructure and retrieval systems that power Lightfield’s AI-driven CRM.

Your work will enable real-time insights, intelligent automation, and seamless customer interactions, making our CRM fast, intuitive, and indispensable.

What you’ll do

  • Architect and scale the data infrastructure, search, and retrieval systems that power Lightfield’s AI-driven CRM.

  • Design and optimize data models and indexing strategies to support CRM workflows, AI-driven insights, and contextual search.

  • Build and maintain full-stack systems, end-to-end, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance.

  • Develop observability and metrics to enable smooth operation, proactive issue detection, and continuous improvement.

  • Mentor teammates, participate in code reviews, and help shape engineering culture and practices.

  • Contribute to building a world-class engineering team through recruiting, mentorship, and knowledge-sharing.

Who you are

  • 10+ years of experience in development, with a strong background in infrastructure, data modeling, and backend systems.

  • Deep experience building scalable, high-performance data infrastructure that supports large-scale data processing and retrieval.

  • Strong understanding of database design, indexing strategies, and query optimization, especially in PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.

  • Experience with full-text search infrastructure (e.g., Typesense) to enable fast, structured query capabilities.

  • Experience with vector search and semantic retrieval (e.g., Pinecone) to support AI-driven contextual understanding and recommendations.

  • Experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j) to model complex relationships is a plus.

  • You’re excited about Large Language Models (LLMs) and the opportunity to build systems that leverage them for search, retrieval, and automated insights.

  • You have the ability to ramp quickly on tech stack that currently features TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Apollo GraphQL, and PostgreSQL, Typesense, and Pinecone.

  • Strong fundamentals in software engineering, with a degree in Computer Science or a related field.

  • Thrives in ambiguity, able to independently drive projects and deliver results in a fast-moving environment.

  • Clear communicator, capable of articulating technical decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

  • Passionate about building products customers love, ensuring our CRM is intuitive, intelligent, and indispensable.

About this role

Summary

Lead the design and scaling of data infrastructure for AI-driven CRM.

Job title

Technical Lead, Data Systems & Infrastructure

Experience level

10+ years

Industry

software

Location requirements

Located in San Francisco; remote work not mentioned.

Salary

Not specified

Management role

Yes

Skills & keywords

Required skills

infrastructuredata modelingbackend systemsPostgreSQLfull-text searchvector searchsemantic retrievalgraph databasesTypeScriptReactNext.jsNode.jsApollo GraphQL

Preferred skills

Large Language Modelscommunication

Specializations

data infrastructuredata modelingbackend systemsfull-stackAI
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

San Francisco, CA, USA

On-site City