---
title: 'Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI at Lightfield'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-applied-ai-lightfield-san-francisco-yg0d14gdk1mx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI at Lightfield

- **Company:** Lightfield
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lightfield/b32dc57b-ffa0-4bb7-99c8-f469c3876002

## Job description

## About Lightfield

Lightfield is reimagining CRM as a world model of a business. By learning from emails, meetings, and customer conversations, we’re building a living understanding of how a company works—so AI can help teams anticipate what comes next, make better decisions, and take action. More than 5,000 companies have used the product since its November launch. We’ve raised more than $70M from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Maverick Ventures, and Greylock to attack the biggest software category in the world. We previously built Tome, which reached more than 25 million users, and our team brings experience from Llama, Instagram, Google, and Salesforce.

## About the role

We’re looking for a driven, creative engineer who is excited about the challenge of leveraging LLMs to build exceptionally innovative product experiences. You’ll join us at the frontier of AI product development, developing industry-leading approaches to solve important customer problems. Engineers at Lightfield own and drive projects from inception to impact, working with teammates of all functions along the way. You’ll also push our company’s overall product and technical vision as we learn from each project and continue to scale.

## What you'll do

- Collaborate with product leaders to identify customer problems, scope requirements, and implement LLM-powered solutions.
- Apply LLMs as reasoning engines to build domain-specific AI assistants.
- Create and enhance prompts, applying techniques like few-shot learning and chain-of-thought.
- Develop and optimize end-to-end RAG pipelines and agent architectures to leverage public and proprietary data.
- Improve end-to-end AI agent quality (e.g. relevance, fidelity, latency) via empirical evaluation and iteration.
- Build and enhance systems and tools that enable high-velocity experimentation (e.g. LLM-powered automated evaluation) and customized product experiences.
- Stay at the forefront of AI research and incorporate state-of-the-art techniques.
- Shape technical direction and best practices for AI application development at Lightfield.
- Help build a world-class engineering team by recruiting and mentoring teammates.

## Who you are

- You have 7+ years experience and the ability to ramp up quickly on a tech stack that features TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Apollo GraphQL, and Aurora PostgreSQL.
- You have explored working with LLMs, either through professional projects or personal experimentation.
- You have a degree in Computer Science or a related field, with a strong foundation in software engineering principles.
- You are familiar with AI and ML concepts (e.g. training, evaluation techniques).
- You are passionate about keeping up with and exploring the latest advancements in LLMs and LLMOps (including open source solutions).
- You are excited to develop new best practices in an emerging domain.
- You can drive a project with an ambiguous problem independently.
- You enjoy strategically balancing ambitious vision with frequent delivery of user value.
- You are able to clearly communicate your reasoning and decisions to your teammates (technical and nontechnical) at an appropriate altitude of detail.
- You are energized by building software experiences customers will use directly and depend on to do their jobs successfully.

## Benefits & Perks

- Competitive salary
- Meaningful early equity
- Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
- 3 weeks of PTO
- 11 paid company holidays + we enjoy a winter holiday break
- 3 months of paid family leave
- Wednesdays work from home
- Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats
- 401k plan
- Other perks include: commuter and lunch stipend

## About Lightfield

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Lightfield is an AI-native CRM that automatically captures every customer interaction from email, calendar, and meetings, and builds a living world model of your company’s relationships and decisions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Startup)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Henri Liriani, Keith Peiris

## Core Business
- Primary industry: AI-native CRM / Sales & Customer Relationship Management
- Target customers: B2B sales teams, customer-facing organizations (SMB to mid-market)
- Mission or purpose statement: “Help founders build better businesses” by creating software that provides deep, continuous customer understanding — a world model of your company starting with your customers. [lightfield.app/company](https://lightfield.app/company)

## Products & Services
- **Lightfield Platform (AI-native CRM)** — An open platform that ingests email, calls, and meetings automatically. It offers:
  - **Natural language agents**: Build agents with prompts (no code) to prospect, manage follow-ups, and coach deals.
  - **Automated data capture**: Every interaction is recorded, attributed, and connected into accounts, tasks, and timelines.
  - **Reasoning & automation**: Ask questions like “which customers asked for this feature?” and get answers with citations; automate pipeline updates, enrichment, and revival emails.
  - **Security & compliance**: SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001. [lightfield.app](https://lightfield.app/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Not publicly available (revenue not disclosed)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly available
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount: 31 employees (+192.3% YoY) [linkedin.com/company/lightfld](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightfld)
  - Active job postings: 16 (up +128.6% YoY)
  - LinkedIn followers: 4,863 (+2709.6% yearly growth)
  - Monthly web traffic: +83.5% (14.2K visits) [same LinkedIn source]
  - Rapid product releases: frequent changelog updates (May/June 2026) with features like API controls, email conversations, custom objects, SSO, and meeting recording. [lightfield.app](https://lightfield.app/)

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-native, not retrofitted**: Differs from traditional CRMs by capturing raw interaction data (actual words, chronology, causality) rather than manual summaries or fields.
- **World model approach**: A system that understands what happened, why it happened, and what is likely to happen next — enabling safe, high-quality automation and deep customer insights.
- **Strong security posture**: Holds SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 certifications — rare for an early-stage startup.
- **Open platform**: API and MCP server for custom integrations, allowing data to flow in and out freely.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building the “world model of your company” by deepening automatic capture, causal reasoning, and agent capabilities.
- Scale go-to-market (hiring a Founding Account Executive, Community Lead) while expanding the platform’s AI and infrastructure teams.
- Maintain compliance and trust as the platform matures (mentioned roadmap includes “Foundations” and “Agents” on the product page).

## Why Work Here
- **Early-stage impact**: Join a team of 31 people (largely technical: 38% engineering/design) and help shape the foundational product. Recent hires come from Tome, Gong, Uber, and other high-growth companies.
- **Remote/hybrid friendly**: Team distributed across US (majority), Canada, and India. [linkedin.com/company/lightfld](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightfld)
- **Engineering culture**: AI/ML deep tech focus — building agents, world models, and reasoning systems. Titles include Machine Learning Engineer, GenAI Platform Engineer, AI Product Engineer, and Infrastructure Lead.
- **Growth trajectory**: Headcount more than doubled in the last year, with active hiring across all departments. The company’s mission emphasizes “deep customer understanding,” appealing to builders who want to solve real business problems with AI.
- **Transparent product velocity**: Public changelog shows frequent releases (weekly), indicating a fast-moving, iterative engineering culture.

## Sources
1. [lightfield.app](https://lightfield.app/)
2. [lightfield.app/company](https://lightfield.app/company)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/Lightfield](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Lightfield)
4. [linkedin.com/company/lightfld](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightfld)
5. [lightfield.app/blog/why-we-built-lightfield](https://lightfield.app/blog/why-we-built-lightfield)

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