Senior Software Engineer
Amplitude•San Francisco, CA
•Hybrid
About The Position
Amplitude is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join their team focused on the Nova OLAP engine. This role involves deep work on the engine's internals and underlying infrastructure, including query execution, columnar storage, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure. The engineer will drive improvements in performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability, contributing to a system that processes trillions of events in real time and powers AI agents for product teams. The team consists of approximately 10 engineers, and this role is ideal for someone who enjoys optimizing complex distributed systems.
Requirements
- 3+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with exposure to distributed data systems.
- Hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems (query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, streaming systems, storage engines, or equivalent).
- Experience improving cost or performance on cloud infrastructure (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, Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform) or strong equivalents.
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
- Demonstrated ability to own and ship significant pieces of complex systems.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with engineers and partner teams.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
- JVM expertise (GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization).
- 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.
Responsibilities
- Build and improve core query engine components, including query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management.
- Implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support more warehouse-imported data types.
- Ensure Nova's components support high-throughput automated query workloads for AI agents.
- Own and execute projects that reduce infrastructure cost while maintaining or improving latency and throughput.
- Profile and optimize JVM performance, including GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout.
- Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries.
- Strengthen Nova's reliability posture by identifying failure modes, driving fixes, and improving production issue detection and response.
- Participate in on-call rotation to root-cause incidents and implement lasting improvements.
- Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and operational tooling.
- Lead the design and execution of multi-week to multi-month projects.
- Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
- Pair with and learn from senior and staff engineers, and share knowledge with peers.
- Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams.
Benefits
- Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans
- 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match of up to 1% of your eligible pay each pay period up to $2,000 annually
- Flexible time off
- Paid holidays
- Generous stipends for wellness, commuter transit/parking, learning and development, new hire home office equipment
- 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave
- Carrot Fertility Benefits/Adoption/Surrogacy support
- Back-up Child Care support
- Mental health and wellness benefits including no cost employee access to Modern Health coaching & therapy sessions
- Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
- Equity, benefits and other forms of compensation
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
