About the Role & Team
Every AI insight, every experiment, every cohort at Amplitude starts with a query. Our in-house OLAP engine, Nova, processes trillions of events in real time — turning raw behavioral data into fast, trustworthy answers that power decisions for thousands of product teams worldwide.
We’re entering a world where AI agents don’t just assist product teams — they ship features, run experiments, and make prioritization calls autonomously. What makes that possible is agents’ ability to verify their work against real product data continuously. That makes Nova the critical infrastructure in the loop, and as non-stop agents become the main source of queries, the demand on Nova’s throughput, correctness, and operational rigor grows dramatically.
We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer who wants to go deep on both the engine internals and the infrastructure underneath it. You’ll work across the full stack of a modern OLAP system — query planning and execution, columnar storage and encoding, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure — while driving meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale. You’ll influence technical direction through your work, your design reviews, and your mentorship of other engineers on a team of ~10.
This role is ideal for someone who finds real satisfaction in making a complex distributed system faster, cheaper, and more reliable — and who wants to do that work on a system that directly powers the product experience for thousands of customers.
What You’ll Do
Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure
- Work across Nova's query execution engine and distributed compute layer: query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management.
- Design and implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support more warehouse-imported data types, such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
- Design for high-throughput automated query workloads — as AI agents become a primary source of queries, ensure Nova’s architecture supports sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns at scale.
Drive cost and performance at scale
- Own and execute projects that materially reduce infrastructure cost — compute, storage, network, and memory — while maintaining or improving latency and throughput.
- Profile and optimize JVM performance: GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout decisions that compound at our scale.
- Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries before they impact the system.
Improve reliability and operational excellence
- Strengthen Nova’s reliability posture: identify systemic failure modes, drive durable fixes, and raise the bar on how we detect and respond to production issues.
- Participate in on-call rotation to root-cause incidents and turn one-off fixes into architectural improvements.
- Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that keeps Nova healthy.
Influence through technical leadership
- Lead the design and execution of multi-month projects that improve Nova’s architecture, performance, or capabilities.
- Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews — helping the team make principled tradeoffs.
- Mentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking, production debugging, and system design.
- Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova’s capabilities translate into customer value.
Who You Are
You are an experienced systems engineer who:
- Gets energy from working deep inside a complex distributed system — understanding how data flows through it, where the bottlenecks are, and how to make it meaningfully better.
- Has built or significantly extended an OLAP engine, columnar database, query processor, or large-scale data processing system — not just operated one.
- Thinks about cost, performance, and reliability as interconnected concerns, not separate workstreams.
- Communicates clearly about technical tradeoffs and earns influence through the quality of your work and ideas, not through title.
- Finds it natural to help other engineers level up — through pairing, design reviews, or just being the person who explains the “why” behind a system’s design.
Qualifications
Requirements
- 7+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems.
- Hands-on experience building or extending analytical/OLAP systems — query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, or equivalent.
- Track record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale (compute, storage, network).
- Strong computer science fundamentals: distributed systems (partitioning, replication, consistency, failover), data structures and algorithms, concurrency and multi-threading, performance optimization.
- Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure — AWS (S3, DynamoDB, EC2), Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform — or strong equivalents.
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
- Demonstrated technical influence beyond your immediate team: leading design discussions, driving cross-team alignment, mentoring engineers.
Nice to Have
- Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
- Deep JVM expertise — GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization at production scale.
- Experience with columnar data formats and encodings (Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats).
- Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems.
- Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects or published work in the data systems space.
Our values:
At Amplitude, our values guide how we show up for one another and for our customers:
- Humility: We operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view.
- Ownership: We take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared company success.
- Growth Mindset: We’re tenacious in the face of challenges and seek feedback in order to grow ourselves and others.
- Customer Centricity: We put the customer at the center of everything we do and are deeply committed to their success.
We care about the well-being of our team: We offer competitive pay and benefits packages that reflect our commitment to the health and well-being of our Ampliteers.
Some of our benefit programs include:
- Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans
- Flexible time off, paid holidays, and more
- Generous stipends to spend on what matters most to you, whether that’s wellness (monthly), commuter transit/parking (monthly), learning and development (quarterly), home office equipment (annual), and much more
- Excellent Parental benefits including: 12-20 weeks of Paid Parental Leave, Carrot Fertility Benefits/Adoption/Surrogacy support, Back-up Child Care support
- Mental health and wellness benefits including no cost employee access to Modern Health coaching & therapy Sessions and high quality physician office experience via One Medical membership (select U.S. locations only)
- Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
Other fun facts about Amplitude:
- Our customers love us! They've said we're the #1 product analytics solution for 23 quarters in a row on G2.
- We care a lot about product innovation. We've made significant investments in talent and infrastructure to build the most powerful AI analytics platform on the market.
- We invest in our people. We offer mentorship programs, management training, and wellness initiatives.
- We give back to our communities. We give every Ampliteer a charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off.
- We were founded in 2012, went public via a direct listing in September 2021, and are now trading under the ticker $AMPL.
- We’re a global and fast-growing team! We have employees around the world and offices in San Francisco (HQ), New York, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo.
- Our mascot is Data Monster, who loves to chow down on numbers, charts, and graphs. Nom nom.
Amplitude provides equal employment opportunities (EEO). All applicants are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation.
This role is eligible for equity, benefits and other forms of compensation.
Based on Colorado law, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in Colorado. Colorado range: $198,000 - $299,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
Based on legislation in New York City, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in New York City. New York City salary range: $220,000 - $331,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
Based on legislation in California, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in San Francisco Bay Area of California. Salary range: $220,000 - $331,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
Based on legislation in California, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in California outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. California salary range: $198,000 - $299,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
Based on legislation in Washington state, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in Washington state. Washington salary range: $198,000 - $299,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
Based on legislation in Washington state, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in Washington only: unlimited PTO, 10 to 13 holidays annually (will vary), medical dental and vision PPO and CDHP plans. Finally, a company sponsored 401(k) retirement plan.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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