Senior Software Engineer (Query Infrastructure)

Amplitude•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Amplitude is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to work on Nova, its in-house OLAP engine, which processes trillions of events in real time and powers product decisions for customers and AI agents. The engineer will own significant components of a modern OLAP system across query execution, columnar storage, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure, improving performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability. The role includes building elastic query infrastructure for AI agents, solving performance problems in engine internals and cloud infrastructure, and owning production reliability through on-call work, incident investigation, and architectural improvements. The engineer will also set technical direction for major initiatives, lead them from proposal through production, shape Nova’s evolution and priorities, and help other senior engineers tackle complex technical problems. Amplitude describes its working values as humility, ownership, growth mindset, and customer centricity. The role is eligible for equity, benefits, and other forms of compensation. Compensation ranges vary by location: $165,000–$247,000 in Colorado, California outside the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington; and $183,000–$276,000 in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. These figures are total target cash, inclusive of bonus or commission.

Requirements

At least 4 years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems.
Hands-on experience building or extending analytical or OLAP systems, such as query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing, or streaming frameworks, or equivalent.
Track record of leading multi-month, cross-team technical projects from design through production, including significant cost or performance wins on cloud infrastructure.
Strong computer science fundamentals, including distributed systems (partitioning, replication, consistency, and failover), data structures and algorithms, concurrency, and performance optimization.
Demonstrated technical influence beyond the immediate team, including leading design discussions, driving cross-team alignment, and mentoring engineers.
Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.

Nice To Haves

Experience with query or OLAP systems such as Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, Spark, BigQuery, or Snowflake.
Experience with SQL planning and optimization, or building SQL layers over heterogeneous storage.
Familiarity with open table and columnar formats such as Iceberg, Parquet, Arrow, or ORC, and warehouse-native architectures.
Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, event-driven data systems, or serving data to LLM and agent workloads.

Responsibilities

Own core components across query execution, columnar storage, and distributed compute.
Design elastic query infrastructure for AI agents, targeting 10× query throughput with predictable performance and lower cost per query.
Solve performance problems across engine internals and cloud infrastructure, including JVM and memory optimization and distributed execution.
Own production reliability through on-call work, incident investigation, and architectural improvements.
Set technical direction for major initiatives and lead them from proposal through production, with clear milestones and measurable results.
Determine what to build or adopt and how to evolve Nova for its next order of magnitude in scale.
Work across engineering and product to set priorities and resolve trade-offs between capabilities, complexity, and cost.
Help senior engineers take on larger technical problems through design reviews, debugging, and shared ownership.

Benefits

Equity and other forms of compensation.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance; employee premiums are fully paid on select plans.
401(k) retirement plan with an employer match of up to 1% of eligible pay each pay period, up to $2,000 annually.
Flexible time off and paid holidays.
Monthly wellness stipends and commuter transit or parking stipends.
Quarterly learning and development stipends.
New-hire home office equipment stipend.
12 weeks of paid parental leave.
Carrot fertility, adoption, and surrogacy support.
Back-up child care support.
Mental health and wellness benefits, including no-cost access to Modern Health coaching and therapy sessions.
Employee Stock Purchase Program.
Charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off.
For Washington-based employees: unlimited PTO, 10 to 13 holidays annually, medical, dental, and vision PPO and CDHP plans, and a company-sponsored 401(k) retirement plan.