Staff Software Engineer

About the company:

LightTable is an AI-powered construction document review platform built for preconstruction teams that was just named one of Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech for 2026. We automate cross-document conflict detection across the complex, multi-party workflows that define how data centers and large commercial projects are designed and built. We recently closed our Series A led by Innovation Endeavors and are in active enterprise deployments with some of the largest GCs and data center builders in the country.

We move fast, we care about leverage, and we build with AI. We do this not just for our customers, but internally too. You’ll find a hard working team that will give you an incredible opportunity to quickly grow in your career.

The Role

Objective: Be one of the strongest hands-on engineers on LightTable's lean, AI-native team. Own technical judgment, design, and delivery for a feature area, and help the platform expand from drawing review into new pre-construction workflows without a rewrite. This role is about building, not managing.

Operating Model

• Ship complete features end to end inside your pod, across AI, web, backend, and infrastructure, on a schedule the business can plan around

• Write and review code every day: design reviews, architectural tradeoffs, and the quality bar inside your feature area are yours

• Partner with the CTO, the architecture tech lead, and the pod leads on shared architecture, clean interfaces between feature areas, and no duplicated work

• Work side by side with in-house domain experts, design partners, and customers (pre-construction teams, general contractors, and data center builders)

• Build with AI coding tools aggressively but thoughtfully, and share with the team where tools like Claude Code and Codex genuinely make it faster

What You’ll Do

Own Complete Features End to End

• Take features from ambiguous problem to production across a React frontend, a Python (FastAPI) backend, and LLM pipelines

• Hold a consistently high engineering bar through code review and design review, and mentor senior engineers by example

• Work in a senior, lean team by design: small pods of senior and staff-level engineers where everyone does hands-on work every day

Own Technical Decisions in Your Feature Area

• Own design reviews, architectural tradeoffs, and code quality across a React frontend and a Python (FastAPI) backend

• Work across a best-tool-for-the-job stack that includes Railway, Clerk, Supabase, S3, Modal, and Grafana, with no lock-in to a single cloud provider

• Translate architecture direction into designs, scope, and sequencing you and your pod can execute

Make AI Output Reliable

• Build and debug agentic LLM workflows (Pydantic AI for orchestration and provider abstraction) that find real coordination issues

• Think like an ML engineer about why a model output is wrong and how to fix it: evaluation, data, and feedback loops with in-house domain experts

• Keep quality high as review volume grows, including personalized prioritization that learns from how each customer ranks issues

Solve Hard Document Understanding Problems

• Turn high-resolution drawing sets into structured understanding

• Triangulate across dozens of document types: drawings, contracts, specifications thousands of pages long, purchase orders, Gantt charts, and field data

• Run long, fan-out-heavy jobs efficiently: a single drawing set upload can drive thousands of $’s of API calls and compute over many hours

Scale the Platform

• Build the platform foundations that let engineering grow from about ten people toward 15-20 within a year without slowing down

• Raise the technical bar for the team through architecture proposals, reusable patterns, and pragmatic tooling

• Prepare the platform for new workflows such as estimating, value engineering, and permitting, and later construction and operations

What We’re Looking For

We're looking for a hands-on senior engineer who is a builder first: strong product sense and real technical depth, comfortable blurring the lines between engineer, product manager, and designer. Strong computer science fundamentals and fluency in data science and machine learning matter, because many of LightTable's hardest problems are data science problems at heart. The north-star profile is a senior or staff-level engineer (roughly L6) who has owned large systems, set technical direction, and mentored senior engineers, while still shipping every day.

Must-Have Experience

• 10+ years coding professionally, with deep hands-on ownership of production systems

• Senior staff-level technical depth (roughly P6/L6): you have owned large systems and set technical direction as an individual contributor

• Startup experience where the lines between code, data, product, and design blur, and comfort operating in that overlap

• Strong computer science fundamentals and fluency in data science and machine learning concepts (for example, overfitting and experiment design)

• Comfort building with LLMs: you have shipped something real on top of them, or you are clearly hungry to

• Strong experience with modern React and Python (FastAPI), or comparable full-stack depth you can transfer quickly

• Daily, forward-thinking use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, with nuance about where they help and where they carry risk

• Product thinking and some design sense: you care what the customer touches, and you believe great engineering requires product thinking

• A consistently high bar for code quality and design, and comfort giving direct technical feedback in reviews

• Deep technical curiosity that has led to expertise across an atypically broad range of topics

• Builder mentality in a fast-moving startup: comfort with ambiguity, multiple hats, and an org chart that will keep changing

• Based in the Denver Metro area (Boulder works) and in the downtown Denver office Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Nice-to-Have Experience

• Past work as a startup founder, CTO, or CPO (a big plus)

• Experience as a founding or early engineer at an early-stage startup

• Experience with data infrastructure, ML/AI tooling, or AI evaluation systems

• Experience with agentic AI systems, computer vision, or document understanding in production

• Experience with high-resolution image processing or long-running, fan-out-heavy pipelines

Why Join LightTable AI?

• We think LightTable is legitimately and objectively the most exciting AI startup in Colorado, and we would like you to come pressure-test that.

• Shape the engineering org at the moment it forms. You are one of the first two pod leaders, not the tenth manager in an existing system.

• Work with a CTO who is staying deeply technical, so your judgment is engaged rather than overruled.

• Build an AI-first product alongside domain experts in architecture and construction.

• Ground-floor opportunity with meaningful equity in a fast-growing company.

• Real impact: we are building fast and partnering with some of the largest developers and contractors in the country.