Software Engineer, Applied AI (Staff+)
Lightfield
San Francisco, CA · $220k–$300k a year · Posted September 23, 2026
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Where San Francisco, CA ranks
Where San Francisco, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for security jobs316 openings · of 20
- #1Best cities for technology jobs7,178 openings · of 100
- #1Best cities for financial services pay after cost of living$173k · of 33
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills35% · of 100
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast35% · of 54
- #1Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the West Coast902 jobs · of 47
Rankings about data & analytics jobs
- Best cities for data and analytics jobs #1 New York (1,713 openings)
- Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living #1 Foster ($232k)
- Most requested AI skills in data and analytics jobs #1 Machine learning engineering (17.1%)
- AI tools named most often in data and analytics jobs #1 Databricks (7.6%)
- Employers with the most data and analytics jobs #1 Amazon (711 roles)
Data & Analytics jobs · Top Data & Analytics employers · All rankings
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $260,000 a year. Across 475 open software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $159,500 to $238,500 and the median is $197,500. That is 32% above the median, above the middle half of those listings.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
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
- Build and evolve our agent harness: the agent loop, tools, skills, and memory.
- Build agentic workflows that automate complex, multi-step processes, from understanding deals and pipeline to finding and reaching new customers.
- Design sophisticated customer-facing experiences that make powerful data and AI capabilities intuitive and easy to use.
- Improve quality, cost and latency through evals, simulation environments and experiments.
- Build reliable, scalable, high-performance systems with strong observability, metrics, and operational practices.
- Lead technical design, mentor other engineers, and help establish engineering best practices.
- Contribute to building a world-class engineering team through recruiting and knowledge-sharing.
WHO YOU ARE
- You have 7+ years building production software, including recent hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered products or agents.
- You are excited to take ambiguous problems from customer conversations to production.
- You enjoy strategically balancing ambitious vision with frequent delivery of user value.
- You are excited to develop new best practices in an emerging domain.
- You are able to clearly communicate your reasoning and decisions to your teammates (technical and nontechnical) at an appropriate altitude of detail.
- You have grown and mentored early career engineers.
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