Senior Staff Production Engineer

Lightspark is building open payments for the Internet—always-on payment solutions powered by Bitcoin, the only open, neutral network for moving value. With enterprise tools like Connect, UMA, and Spark, businesses can send and receive money instantly, securely, and at a fraction of the cost, anytime, anywhere. Lightspark is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, but serves the world.

We are looking for a Senior Staff Production Engineer to drive the technical vision and architecture of Lightspark’s core infrastructure. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-moving environments, is deeply hands-on, and has a track record of solving complex, large-scale engineering challenges. You’ll shape infrastructure strategy across the company, lead high-impact initiatives, and ensure the performance, security, and reliability of systems powering mission-critical financial transactions.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

• Setting the technical direction for Lightspark’s production infrastructure and influencing engineering strategy across multiple teams.

• Architecting and scaling secure, highly available distributed systems that support global, 24/7 financial transactions.

• Designing next-generation infrastructure platforms and frameworks (observability, deployment, security, compute, networking) that other engineers build on.

• Leading cross-functional, company-wide initiatives to improve reliability, performance, and operational excellence.

• Anticipating future scale, regulatory, and security needs—and driving long-term solutions before they become bottlenecks.

• Mentoring other engineers, elevating technical judgment, and contributing to a culture of craftsmanship and accountability.

• Owning and improving high-severity production operations, incident response, and postmortems.
  

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• 10+ years of experience in Production Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, or related infrastructure-focused roles.

• Demonstrated ability to architect and operate large-scale distributed systems with strong security, reliability, and regulatory considerations.

• Strong software engineering skills and ability to produce high-quality, maintainable, well-tested code.

• Proven leadership of complex technical initiatives that span multiple teams or domains.

• Deep expertise with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, etc.).

• Proficiency with high-level programming languages such as Python (Go, Rust, or similar languages are a plus).

• Strong communicator who can influence technical and strategic decisions across engineering and leadership.

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science or equivalent experience; non-traditional backgrounds are equally valued.

Lightspark is on a mission to build an open payment protocol for the Internet at scale and therefore 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. 

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.