Senior Software Engineer, Data & AI
Builds and expands Lighthouse, Lightspark's internal data and AI platform — agent harness, MCP/tool integrations, dbt/BigQuery pipelines — so Sales, Finance, Ops, and Compliance run their workflows on trusted data and AI agents. Needs 4+ years shipping production systems, TypeScript/Node or Python, and cloud data warehouse fluency; LA-based or open to relocating.
- Compensation
- $200K–$238K / yr
- Location
- Los Angeles HQ
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 4+ years experience shipping and maintaining production systems (data, ML, or backend/full-stack)
- Has built an internal platform or workflow system that other teams adopted
- Has built with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, and MCP in production, beyond prompting
- Strong fundamentals in TypeScript/Node or Python and willingness to work in both
- Fluency with a cloud data warehouse such as BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks
- Able to sit with non-technical teams, understand their workflows, and build systems for them
- Comfortable working with ambiguity in a startup environment
- Based in LA or openness to relocate to Los Angeles, California
Nice to have
- Experience in payments, crypto, or blockchain
Full 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