Senior Software Engineer – OLAP Engine & Nova

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

Benefits offered by this job

Excellent medical, dental and vision

401(k) with employer match

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase program

Parental benefits

Mental health resources

Volunteer time off

Job summary

Amplitude, a leading AI analytics platform, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own core OLAP engine components, including query execution, storage encoding, and distributed compute. You will optimize performance, reduce costs, and ensure reliability across a high-throughput environment powering thousands of product teams.

The role emphasizes deep systems work, cross-team collaboration, and technical leadership within a ~10-person team, with opportunities to shape the roadmap and contribute

Qualifications

• 3+ years of backend or infrastructure engineering with distributed data systems.
• Hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems: query engines, columnar storage, data processing frameworks.
• Experience improving cost or performance on cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, network).
• Strong CS fundamentals: distributed systems, data structures, concurrency, performance optimization.
• Production experience with cloud infra (AWS, Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform) or equivalents.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
• Demonstrated ability to own and ship significant pieces of complex systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve core query engine components within the Nova OLAP system.
• Own projects to reduce infrastructure cost while maintaining latency and throughput.
• Profile and optimize JVM performance, memory management, and data layout decisions.
• Strengthen reliability, identify failure modes, and improve production incident response.
• Lead multi-week to multi-month projects and collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Skills

Distributed data systems

Backend software

Cloud infrastructure

Java/Python/C++

Distributed systems fundamentals

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Kafka

Redis/ElastiCache

Job description

Amplitude, a leading AI analytics platform, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own core OLAP engine components, including query execution, storage encoding, and distributed compute. You will optimize performance, reduce costs, and ensure reliability across a high-throughput environment powering thousands of product teams.

The role emphasizes deep systems work, cross-team collaboration, and technical leadership within a ~10-person team, with opportunities to shape the roadmap and contribute