---
title: 'Lead Backend Engineer at caplight.com'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-backend-engineer-caplight-com-san-francisco-td5vvytxv61y'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Lead Backend Engineer at caplight.com

- **Company:** caplight.com
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $215k–$260k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-09-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/caplight-com/am9icG9zdDo_QcgKtJac3W-W9bkN5lN-

## Job description

Lead Backend Engineer

To apply, please send your resume and a brief note on why you are interested in the position to justin@caplight.com

Caplight & Role Overview [**Caplight](http://www.caplight.com)** is a fast-moving, seed-stage startup redefining how VCs and other private market investors operate. With our first product, we’ve reached a cash-flow positive state and built a reputation as an institutional-grade, trusted platform that combines data and research with a modern trading marketplace for private company stock. Our market features billions of dollars in live order volume and is relied upon by many of the world’s leading institutional investors. But we’re just getting started. Our vision is to become the go-to platform that investors, shareholders, and brokers use to gather information, source deals, and complete investments or transactions. To help us get there, we’re hiring a Lead Backend Engineer to take ownership of our backend systems and guide the next stage of our growth. We build fast and want to add someone to the team who will help us build even faster.

## What you will do

- Lead the design and development of Caplight’s backend architecture and APIs.
- Build scalable, reliable systems to ingest, normalize, and enrich data from thousands of sources. We have built out an entire data pipeline using LLMs to source data, and you will oversee taking it to the next level and scaling it.
- Drive the technical foundation for new AI-powered tools that automate investor and broker workflows.
- Break apart monolithic systems into event-driven services that enable faster iteration and cleaner abstractions.
- Collaborate with our CTO to establish backend best practices and coding standards, raise the bar on code quality, and mentor the engineering team.
- Partner with product and leadership to align technical vision with business priorities. Example responsibilities
- Building high-quality datasets from noisy and inconsistent raw inputs, including LLM-enriched data.
- Designing and implementing a new API suite to provide private company data and investor data to integration partners
- Creating internal monitoring and visibility tools for large-scale data pipelines.
- Driving engineering “cost/time estimations” to inform our product roadmap

## About you

- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, able to work in person at our office (531 Howard St) at least 3 days per week.
- 8+ years of backend-leaning or full-stack experience, with recent time at an early-stage startup (Seed–Series A preferred).
- Fast: you can code much faster than your peers; you have expertise using the latest AI tooling for coding and developer workflows, and you have a mentality of constantly getting faster as a developer each passing month.
- Deep proficiency in TypeScript or a typed functional language such as Scala, Rust, or Haskell; adaptable across languages.
- Proven track record architecting systems and building codebases from scratch.
- Excited to take technical ownership and set the direction for backend engineering.
- Open to people leadership; a natural mentor who leads by example. You wont be expected to lead/manage from day 1, but should be open to eventually leading a team.
- Thrive in a high-velocity environment, delivering extensible systems quickly without sacrificing quality.
- Proactive, pragmatic, and thoughtful, with a strong sense of ownership.

## Compensation

- $220k – $270k base salary + equity

## About caplight.com

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Caplight provides institutional investors with a platform for private market pricing, data, and secondary trading, aiming to bring public-market infrastructure to venture-backed assets.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed/Corporate rounds; last round March 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2020 (originally founded as Savory)
- **Founders**: Javier Avalos (Co-founder & CEO), Justin Moore (Co-founder & CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Financial Services – Private market data, trading, and investor intelligence.
- **Target Customers**: Institutional investors – hedge funds, asset managers, secondary funds, RIAs, family offices, broker-dealers (B2B).
- **Mission**: “Bring the infrastructure and ease of public markets to the VC-backed asset class.”

## Products & Services
- **[Secondary Market Pricing](https://www.caplight.com/)**: Real-time and historical private market pricing data sourced from primary and secondary transactions, including Caplight MarketPrice™ benchmark.
- **[Institutional Trading](https://www.caplight.com/)**: An electronic marketplace connecting institutional buyers and sellers of private company shares, with over $5.2B in live buy/sell interest.
- **[Investor Database](https://www.caplight.com/)**: Profiles on thousands of venture, growth, and secondary investors, including portfolio holdings, co-investor networks, and activity signals.
- **[Deal Sourcing and Signal Tracking](https://www.caplight.com/)**: A searchable database of 60,000+ VC-backed companies with founder/team data, momentum scores, and alerts on inflection points.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private).
- **Key Metrics**: $9.7M total funding raised across 2+ rounds; Annual revenue estimated at ~$1M (per LinkedIn); 30-day trading volume of $610M (per website).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Fin Capital (seed lead), Better Tomorrow Ventures (seed lead), Deutsche Börse (corporate round lead, 2022). Recent partnership: selected by Citi to provide independent pricing for its Digital Depositary Receipt (DDR) product.
- **Growth Signals**: 22.2% headcount growth YoY (20 employees); +24.6% LinkedIn follower growth; live order book of $5.2B; expansion into institutional data feeds (Citi deal).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unique data asset**: Caplight captures real-time bid/ask and closed trade data from the secondary market, giving it a proprietary pricing benchmark (MarketPrice™) that competitors lack.
- **Institutional trust**: Platform is built for and used by the world’s largest asset managers, with transparency and compliance standards that differentiate it from consumer-facing secondary market tools.
- **Network effects**: The largest institutional broker network and live order book create a liquidity flywheel that makes the platform more valuable as more participants join.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expand institutional adoption**: Deepening relationships with global banks and asset managers (e.g., Citi DDR) to embed Caplight data feeds into existing workflows.
- **Scale data operations**: Hiring a Data Operations Lead to own data integrity and coverage, indicating a push to make the dataset “the most reliable in the market.”
- **Go-to-market expansion**: Currently hiring across all sales tiers (SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise), signaling a focus on capturing a broader set of institutional clients.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven team**: Small, agile team (20 people) working on bringing transparency and liquidity to opaque private markets.
- **High standards**: Culture emphasizes client trust, quality, and moving fast – “We move quickly to release products and meet ever-changing market conditions.”
- **Work environment**: In-office based in San Francisco (531 Howard Street, SoMa). Open roles are listed as San Francisco · In-Office, suggesting a strong office-first culture.
- **Growth opportunity**: As a private company with fresh momentum (2026 round, Citi win), early employees can have outsized impact on product and market strategy.
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but the company prides itself on “the highest quality offering” and an agile, curious team.

## Sources
1. [caplight.com – Homepage](https://www.caplight.com/)
2. [caplight.com – About](https://www.caplight.com/about)
3. [caplight.com – Careers](https://www.caplight.com/careers)
4. [LinkedIn – Caplight Technologies](https://www.linkedin.com/company/caplight-technologies)
5. [CB Insights – Caplight Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/caplight)

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