Senior Software Engineer, Data & AI

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 DOINGBuilding and owning our internal AI platform: the agent harness, MCP servers and tool integrations, context and access services, sandboxed execution, and cost and usage trackingEmbedding 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 teamsExtending our data infrastructure alongside our Staff Data Engineer: DBT models, BigQuery, orchestration, and the production pipelinesSharing ownership of monitoring, alerting, and data reliability for the systems that unblock product launchesPartnering with Engineering to optimize their own dev systems and toolingWHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR4+ years experience shipping and maintaining production systems; data engineering, ML engineering, and backend/full-stack backgrounds all fitYou've built an internal platform or workflow system that other teams adopted, not just features on top of oneYou've built with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, and MCP in production, beyond prompting, and you know what belongs in code versus a modelStrong fundamentals in TypeScript/Node or Python and the willingness to work in both, plus fluency with a cloud data warehouse such as BigQuery, Snowflake, or DatabricksYou can sit with a non-technical team, understand how their work actually happens, and come back with a systemComfortable working with ambiguity in a startup environmentExperience in payments, crypto, or blockchain is a plus, but not requiredBased in LA or Openness to relocate to Los Angeles, CaliforniaThis is not an ML infrastructure, model-training, or prompt-engineering role. You might currently be an AI engineer, ML engineer, data engineer, or full-stack engineer who has spent the last year or two building agents and internal tooling. If you don't match every line above but have built systems like these, we'd like to hear from you.Lightspark is on a mission to build the future of open, instant, and global financial infrastructure making payments accessible and affordable for everyone, everywhere. We're committed to creating a more inclusive and diverse workplace to reflect the customers we serve. We welcome interest from individuals of all backgrounds and levels of experience who share our mission. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.For US Applicants:We will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of the State of California Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring.For EU Applicants:In accordance with applicable EU and local regulations, including the Estonian Employment Contracts Act, Equal Treatment Act, and Gender Equality Act, Lightspark ensures equal treatment throughout the hiring process.Compensation Range: $200K - $238KLocationLos Angeles HQEmployment TypeFull timeDepartmentData ScienceCompensation$200K – $238K • Offers Equity • Offers BonusWe take into account an individual’s qualifications, skillset and experience when determining salary. The salary range listed in the job posting reflects the new hire salary range across levels that would be applicable to the position and Los Angeles location. This role is eligible for health insurance, life insurance, 401k contribution, paid time off including vacation and sick leave and any other tax-reportable benefits. The final salary will be commensurate with the candidates final level and represents the base salary only. Health insurance coverage including medical, dental, and visionCompetitive salaryStock optionsCompany paid life insurance20 paid vacation days a year, as well as paid holidaysFlexible work scheduleMatching 401kFSA/DCA accounts Generous family leave policiesAnnual bonuses