Software Engineer, Applied AI (Staff+)

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

• 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