Lead Backend Engineer

To apply, please send your resume and a brief note on why you are interested in the position to justin@caplight.com

Caplight & Role Overview

**Caplight** is a fast-moving, seed-stage startup redefining how VCs and other private market investors operate. With our first product, we’ve reached a cash-flow positive state and built a reputation as an institutional-grade, trusted platform that combines data and research with a modern trading marketplace for private company stock. Our market features billions of dollars in live order volume and is relied upon by many of the world’s leading institutional investors.

But we’re just getting started. Our vision is to become the go-to platform that investors, shareholders, and brokers use to gather information, source deals, and complete investments or transactions. To help us get there, we’re hiring a Lead Backend Engineer to take ownership of our backend systems and guide the next stage of our growth. We build fast and want to add someone to the team who will help us build even faster.

What you will do

Lead the design and development of Caplight’s backend architecture and APIs.
Build scalable, reliable systems to ingest, normalize, and enrich data from thousands of sources. We have built out an entire data pipeline using LLMs to source data, and you will oversee taking it to the next level and scaling it.
Drive the technical foundation for new AI-powered tools that automate investor and broker workflows.
Break apart monolithic systems into event-driven services that enable faster iteration and cleaner abstractions.
Collaborate with our CTO to establish backend best practices and coding standards, raise the bar on code quality, and mentor the engineering team.
Partner with product and leadership to align technical vision with business priorities.

Example responsibilities

Building high-quality datasets from noisy and inconsistent raw inputs, including LLM-enriched data.
Designing and implementing a new API suite to provide private company data and investor data to integration partners
Creating internal monitoring and visibility tools for large-scale data pipelines.
Driving engineering “cost/time estimations” to inform our product roadmap

About you

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, able to work in person at our office (531 Howard St) at least 3 days per week.
8+ years of backend-leaning or full-stack experience, with recent time at an early-stage startup (Seed–Series A preferred).
Fast: you can code much faster than your peers; you have expertise using the latest AI tooling for coding and developer workflows, and you have a mentality of constantly getting faster as a developer each passing month.
Deep proficiency in TypeScript or a typed functional language such as Scala, Rust, or Haskell; adaptable across languages.
Proven track record architecting systems and building codebases from scratch.
Excited to take technical ownership and set the direction for backend engineering.
Open to people leadership; a natural mentor who leads by example. You wont be expected to lead/manage from day 1, but should be open to eventually leading a team.
Thrive in a high-velocity environment, delivering extensible systems quickly without sacrificing quality.
Proactive, pragmatic, and thoughtful, with a strong sense of ownership.

Compensation

$220k – $270k base salary + equity

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $215,000 – $260,000 per year.