Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Software Engineering Manager role sits at a core junction in modern SaaS: the analytics infrastructure that turns high-volume product telemetry into decisions. Amplitude’s in-house OLAP engine, Nova, is positioned as a foundational layer for real-time querying at massive event scale, and the listing frames an inflection point where AI agents increase query demand and raise the bar on correctness and operational discipline. That combination makes the work closely tied to how SaaS products measure, iterate, and increasingly automate product development.
From a SaaS career perspective, the role offers durable platform leadership experience that translates across data-intensive products. Owning roadmap direction while being accountable for SLOs, cost efficiency, and incident practices builds the kind of operational and systems-thinking muscle that many SaaS companies need as usage grows. The cross-functional surface area, spanning product, pipelines, warehouses, and customer-facing escalations, also mirrors how infrastructure teams influence customer outcomes in subscription businesses.
This is best suited to a manager who stays technically close, is comfortable making tradeoffs visible, and can align stakeholders around measurable platform outcomes. It will appeal to leaders who enjoy developing engineers while guiding distributed-systems architecture, and who value work where customer learnings directly shape long-lived infrastructure decisions.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
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 an Engineering Manager to lead the Query team through this inflection point. You’ll own the vision and roadmap for one of Amplitude’s most critical infrastructure pillars, lead a high-performing team of engineers, and make the strategic calls that balance today’s reliability with tomorrow’s ambition.
What You’ll Do
- Set the direction for the Query platform — define the roadmap, make priorities explicit, and align engineering, product, and cross-functional partners behind a clear plan.
- Lead and grow a team of ~10 engineers, partnering with your tech lead to define Nova's technical direction while coaching, developing, and scaling the team through hiring and performance feedback.
- Drive platform evolution across the query engine’s core layers — storage, compute and query execution — to define Amplitude’s next generation of analytics.
- Guide the design and operation of large-scale distributed systems, including load management, fault tolerance, capacity planning, and on-call practices. You own the SLOs g, and cost efficiency.
- Report to the Director of Data and partner across Product, Data Warehouse, Data Pipeline, Middleware, AI, and Support to co-define Amplitude's data strategy and shape how customers query and explore their data.
- Engage directly on major customer onboardings and escalations, turning customer learnings into durable platform improvements.
You’ll Thrive Here If You
- Are drawn to hard problems at the intersection of query engines, distributed systems, and product impact — you’re as comfortable discussing storage layout as you are discussing customer outcomes.
- Lead with humility and ownership — you create environments where engineers take real ownership and grow their impact, and you hold yourself to the same standard.
- Think in systems and tradeoffs — you can frame a complex decision clearly, communicate it to a room of mixed stakeholders, and drive alignment.
- Stay technically close — you read design docs, engage in architectural decisions, and give your team the context and space to execute well.
What We’re Looking For
- 2+ years leading engineers (people management and/or tech lead) and 6+ years building backend or infrastructure systems.
- Hands-on experience with distributed data systems — OLAP databases, data warehouses, stream processing, or large-scale storage — and modern cloud infrastructure (AWS S3, DynamoDB, Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform).
- A track record of meaningfully improving reliability, latency, or cost efficiency for a production system with clear SLOs and incident accountability.
- Strong communication skills and experience partnering with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to define roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
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: $227,000 - $341,000 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: $254,000 - $381,000 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: $254,000 - $381,000 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: $227,000 - $341,000 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: $227,000 - $341,000 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.
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