Staff Software Engineer

Amplitude; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision insurance (emr

Flexible time off

Parental benefits

Wellbeing stipends

Job summary

Amplitude, the leading AI analytics platform in San Francisco, seeks an experienced Systems Engineer to deepen Nova, its OLAP-based query engine. You will own parts of the distributed compute stack, optimizing performance, cost, and reliability for trillions of events processed in real time.

You will mentor engineers and collaborate across Product, Middleware, and Data Pipeline teams to deliver scalable data insights.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure engineering with depth in distributed data systems.
• Hands-on experience building analytical/OLAP systems like query engines or large-scale data processing frameworks.
• Track record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale (compute, storage, network).
• Strong CS fundamentals: distributed systems, data structures, concurrency, performance optimization.
• Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform).
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
• Demonstrated ability to influence across teams through design discussions and code reviews.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure across Nova's execution engine and distributed compute layer.
• Design and implement capabilities as Nova expands to support more data types (metrics, profiles, dimensions).
• Ensure high-throughput automated query workloads and scalable query patterns at scale.
• Own projects that reduce infrastructure cost while maintaining latency and throughput.
• Profile and optimize JVM performance and memory management.
• Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Performance optimization

Debugging large-scale systems

System design

Tools

AWS

S3

DynamoDB

EC2

Kafka

Redis/ElastiCache

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

the company is the leading AI analytics platform, helping over 4,700 customers- including Atlassian, Burger King, NBCUniversal, and Square-build better products and digital experiences. With powerful AI Agents embedded across our platform, teams can analyze, test, and optimize user experiences faster than ever. Ranked #1 across multiple categories in G2’s Winter 2026 Report, the company is the best-in-class solution for product, data, and marketing teams. Learn more at the company.com.

As an organization, we deliver for our customers by living our values. We operate from a place of humility, take ownership of problems and successes, approach challenges with a growth mindset, and put our customers at the center of everything we do.

About the Role & Team

Every AI insight, every experiment, every cohort at the company 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.

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

• 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 b