Senior Software Engineer - OLAP & Distributed Data

Amplitude; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 183,000 - 276,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Excellent medical, dental, vision

401(k) with employer match

Flexible time off

Parental benefits

Mental health & wellness benefits

ESPP

Job summary

Amplitude is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own core components of Nova, Amplitude’s in-house OLAP engine. You will drive improvements across query execution, columnar storage, and cloud infra, focusing on performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability for thousands of enterprise products.

You will collaborate with product, middleware, and data teams, contribute to design docs, and mentor peers while shipping significant pieces of a large distributed system.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems — query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, streaming systems, storage engines, or equivalent
• 5+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with exposure to distributed data systems.
• Experience improving cost or performance on cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, network).
• Strong computer science fundamentals: distributed systems, data structures, concurrency, performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Build and own core Nova query engine components across execution, storage formats, encoding, caching, and cluster-level management.
• Improve cost and performance by reducing infra spend while maintaining latency and throughput.
• Profile and optimize JVM performance and memory management.
• Strengthen reliability through proactive fixes, monitoring, and on-call participation.

Skills

Distributed data systems

Backend engineering

Cost optimization

Cloud infrastructure

Java/C++/Python

Tools

AWS

Kafka

Kubernetes

Terraform

Parquet/Arrow

Job description

Amplitude is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own core components of Nova, Amplitude’s in-house OLAP engine. You will drive improvements across query execution, columnar storage, and cloud infra, focusing on performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability for thousands of enterprise products.

You will collaborate with product, middleware, and data teams, contribute to design docs, and mentor peers while shipping significant pieces of a large distributed system.