Staff Software Engineer, Distributed OLAP & Nova

Amplitude, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 331,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Excellent Medical/Dental/Vision

Flexible time off

Parental benefits

Stock Purchase Program

Job summary

Amplitude, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to deepen Nova, our in-house OLAP engine, across query planning, storage, and distributed compute. You’ll optimize cost, performance, and reliability at scale while mentoring engineers on distributed system design.

You’ll influence technical direction, collaborate with Product and Data teams, and help shape a system that powers thousands of customer experiences worldwide.

Qualifications

• 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, data structures and algorithms, concurrency and multi-threading, performance optimization.
• Production experience with AWS, Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform — or strong equivalents.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
• Demonstrated technical influence beyond your immediate team: leading design discussions, mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure across Nova's stack.
• Drive cost and performance through scaling, profiling, and optimization.
• Improve reliability with guardrails, observability, and on-call participation.
• Influence through architecture discussions, design docs, and cross-team collaboration.
• Mentor engineers on distributed systems and production debugging.

Skills

Distributed systems

OLAP engines

Cloud infra

Java

C++

Python

Kafka

Terraform

Kubernetes

Memory optimization

Tools

AWS

S3

DynamoDB

EC2

Kafka

Redis/ElastiCache

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Amplitude, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to deepen Nova, our in-house OLAP engine, across query planning, storage, and distributed compute. You’ll optimize cost, performance, and reliability at scale while mentoring engineers on distributed system design.

You’ll influence technical direction, collaborate with Product and Data teams, and help shape a system that powers thousands of customer experiences worldwide.