Staff Software Engineer — Scalable OLAP & AI Infra

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

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.