---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer, Data & AI at Lightspark'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-data-ai-lightspark-los-angeles-02tyta735r45'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# Senior Software Engineer, Data & AI at Lightspark

- **Company:** Lightspark
- **Location:** Los Angeles, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$238k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lightspark/5593eabf-a7a6-44ac-bd49-7c25c51e5a93

## Job description

Lightspark is creating the Money Grid, modern, open financial infrastructure that makes payments accessible, affordable, and instant for businesses and users worldwide. We're challenging the status quo, updating the current system, and empowering our partners to build better solutions. Together, we're building the most advanced financial infrastructure, open, instant, and global, inspiring a future where anyone, anywhere can access the full potential of digital money. We are looking for engineers who enjoy building and shipping quickly, learning how other teams work, and seeing their work change how an entire company operates. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Data & AI team, you'll expand Lighthouse, our internal data and AI platform, into the layer that lets every function at Lightspark run on trusted data and AI agents. Most of the value in applied AI comes from the connective work: wiring models to a company's data, its tools, and the way people actually work, then getting the result adopted. We've built that layer for analytics, where Lighthouse now handles most of what our team used to do by hand and is used across the company. This role extends it to Sales, Finance, Ops, Legal, Compliance, and Partnerships: the agent harness, tool integrations, governed source-of-truth data, and the execution layer those teams run their workflows on. General-purpose assistants get partway there and miss things; you'll build the structure underneath so the answers are right, repeatable, and owned by the teams that need them. You'll work on a small, senior team with a lot of ownership. Problems come from talking with the teams you support rather than from a spec; you'll scope them, ship the solution, and make sure it sticks.

## WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

- Building and owning our internal AI platform: the agent harness, MCP servers and tool integrations, context and access services, sandboxed execution, and cost and usage tracking
- Embedding with Finance, Sales Ops, Compliance, and onboarding to understand how their work actually happens, then shipping the systems that replace the manual version and handing them off to those teams
- Extending our data infrastructure alongside our Staff Data Engineer: DBT models, BigQuery, orchestration, and the production pipelines
- Sharing ownership of monitoring, alerting, and data reliability for the systems that unblock product launches
- Partnering with Engineering to optimize their own dev systems and tooling

## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- 4+ years experience shipping and maintaining production systems; data engineering, ML engineering, and backend/full-stack backgrounds all fit
- You've built an internal platform or workflow system that other teams adopted, not just features on top of one
- You've built with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, and MCP in production, beyond prompting, and you know what belongs in code versus a model
- Strong fundamentals in TypeScript/Node or Python and the willingness to work in both, plus fluency with a cloud data warehouse such as BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks
- You can sit with a non-technical team, understand how their work actually happens, and come back with a system
- Comfortable working with ambiguity in a startup environment
- Experience in payments, crypto, or blockchain is a plus, but not required
- Based in LA or Openness to relocate to Los Angeles, California

This is not an ML infrastructure, model-training, or prompt-engineering role. You might currently be an AI engineer, ML engineer, data engineer, or full-stack engineer who has spent the last year or two building agents and internal tooling. If you don't match every line above but have built systems like these, we'd like to hear from you.

Lightspark is on a mission to build the future of open, instant, and global financial infrastructure making payments accessible and affordable for everyone, everywhere. We're committed to creating a more inclusive and diverse workplace to reflect the customers we serve. We welcome interest from individuals of all backgrounds and levels of experience who share our mission. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

For US Applicants: We will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of the State of California Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring. For EU Applicants: In accordance with applicable EU and local regulations, including the Estonian Employment Contracts Act, Equal Treatment Act, and Gender Equality Act, Lightspark ensures equal treatment throughout the hiring process.

## About Lightspark

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Lightspark builds open, instant financial infrastructure by bridging the Lightning Network with legacy banking systems to enable real-time, low-cost global payments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: Los Angeles, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: David Marcus, Tomer Barel, Christian Catalini (Catalini departed in Feb 2026)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Financial Services / Payments Infrastructure
- Target customers: B2B — digital banks, global marketplaces, creator platforms, fintechs, and enterprises needing cross-border payment solutions
- Mission: Transform payments by creating the most accessible, reliable, enterprise-grade payment solution — making money move as seamlessly as information on the internet.

## Products & Services
- **Grid API**: One API/SDK to send, receive, and settle value globally across fiat, stablecoins, or bitcoin — always real-time, always low cost.
- **Grid Global Accounts**: A branded global dollar account that allows businesses to offer their own branded accounts and turn every payout into revenue.
- **Spark**: A Bitcoin Layer 2 solution enabling instant, near-zero cost movement of bitcoin and stablecoins on a neutral network.
- **Connect**: Tools and APIs for businesses to integrate with the Lightspark platform effortlessly.
- **Lightning Platform**: Reliable, scalable, and optimized Lightning Network node infrastructure and transaction processing.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding — $1.3M (Seed round, Aug 2024); previously raised a Series A (May 2022) led by Paradigm and a16z crypto with 9 investors.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Paradigm, a16z crypto; acquired Striga to expand European presence. Connects 100M+ customers at Coinbase to Lightning.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew +2.4% YoY to 79 employees; presence in Estonia, Israel, and Italy; 10 active job postings; acquired Striga for European expansion.

## Competitive Advantages
- Built on the only decentralized and neutral network (Bitcoin/Lightning), eliminating middlemen and gatekeepers.
- Enterprise-grade, compliance-ready infrastructure that bridges legacy banking with digital money.
- Backed by top-tier crypto/tech investors (Paradigm, a16z) and leadership with deep payments expertise (CEO David Marcus previously led Messenger at Meta and co-founded Novi).
- First-mover advantage in making Lightning Network accessible to mainstream businesses at scale.

## Strategic Focus
- Expanding global reach through acquisitions (Striga in Europe) and partnerships (Coinbase).
- Building agentic payments, embedded finance, stablecoin solutions, and cross-border payout infrastructure.
- Scaling the engineering team to tackle complex challenges in cryptography, distributed systems, and real-time payments.
- Growing Grid Global Accounts as a platform for businesses to offer branded financial services.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as scrappy, customer-obsessed, and mission-driven — "dream big, innovate boldly, move fast." Team of bold thinkers and relentless builders.
- **Engineering Focus**: Engineers work on cryptography, communication protocols, distributed systems, and web/mobile UX. Tech stack includes modern tools optimized for scalability and security.
- **Benefits**: Competitive salary, stock options, annual bonuses, 20 days PTO + holidays, medical/dental/vision, 401(k) matching, FSA/DCA accounts, generous family leave, One Medical membership, flexible work schedule.
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Flexible work schedule; HQ in Los Angeles with distributed team across US, Estonia, Israel, and Italy.
- **Interviewing**: Transparent interview process with clear stages; emphasis on pragmatism and curiosity.

## Sources
1. [Lightspark.com](https://www.lightspark.com/)
2. [Lightspark Careers](https://www.lightspark.com/careers)
3. [Lightspark About](https://www.lightspark.com/about)
4. [Lightspark Engineering Careers](https://www.lightspark.com/careers/engineering)
5. [LinkedIn - Lightspark](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspark-group)

## Other roles at Lightspark

- [Risk Manager, EU](https://feeny.ai/job/risk-manager-eu-lightspark-estonia-6m51mjtvbbw0) — Estonia
- [Licensing and Audit Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/licensing-and-audit-manager-lightspark-los-angeles-bs5sr7tm0tmf) — Los Angeles, CA
- [AML Manager, EU](https://feeny.ai/job/aml-manager-eu-lightspark-estonia-h808fyz782rs) — Estonia
- [Regulatory Compliance Officer, EU](https://feeny.ai/job/regulatory-compliance-officer-eu-lightspark-estonia-entc33qpmbw0) — Estonia
- [Compliance Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/compliance-program-manager-lightspark-los-angeles-pztaem2v4wfe) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Institutional Due Diligence Specialist, EU](https://feeny.ai/job/institutional-due-diligence-specialist-eu-lightspark-estonia-db8fyh87d659) — Estonia