Staff Software Engineer — Nova OLAP & AI Platform

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

The company in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to go deep on the Nova OLAP engine and the surrounding infrastructure. You will design, implement, and optimize core query execution, storage formats, and distributed compute, while mentoring engineers and guiding architectural choices with product teams.

You will own performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale, drive multi-month initiatives, and help the team ship robust data infrastructure that powers thousands of

Qualifications

• 7+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering.
• Hands-on experience building or extending analytical/OLAP systems—query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure.
• Design and implement capabilities as Nova expands to support more data types.
• Design for high-throughput automated query workloads at scale.
• Own and execute 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.
• Strengthen Nova’s reliability posture and participate in on-call rotation.
• Contribute to capacity planning and operational tooling.
• Lead design and execution of multi-month architecture projects.
• Mentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking and production debugging.
• Collaborate with Product and Data teams to translate capabilities into customer value.

Skills

distributed systems thinking

mentoring engineers

technical leadership

communication of tradeoffs

cost optimization

Tools

AWS

Kafka

Redis/ElastiCache

Kubernetes

Terraform

Java

C++

Python

Job description

The company in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to go deep on the Nova OLAP engine and the surrounding infrastructure. You will design, implement, and optimize core query execution, storage formats, and distributed compute, while mentoring engineers and guiding architectural choices with product teams.

You will own performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale, drive multi-month initiatives, and help the team ship robust data infrastructure that powers thousands of