Senior Software Engineer

Amplitude • San Francisco, CA

87d • $165,000 - $276,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Every AI insight, every experiment, every cohort at Amplitude starts with a query. Our in-house OLAP engine, Nova, processes trillions of events in real time — turning raw behavioral data into fast, trustworthy answers that power decisions for thousands of product teams worldwide. We're entering a world where AI agents don't just assist product teams — they ship features, run experiments, and make prioritization calls autonomously. What makes that possible is agents' ability to verify their work against real product data continuously. That makes Nova the critical infrastructure in the loop, and as non-stop agents become the main source of queries, the demand on Nova's throughput, correctness, and operational rigor grows dramatically. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who wants to go deep on the engine internals and the infrastructure underneath. You'll own significant components of a modern OLAP system — across query execution, columnar storage and encoding, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure — and drive meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability. You'll grow your technical influence through the quality of your code, your design contributions, and your collaboration with other engineers on a team of ~10. This role is ideal for someone who finds real satisfaction in making a complex distributed system faster, cheaper, and more reliable — and who wants to do that work on a system that directly powers the product experience for thousands of enterprise customers.

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 (S3, DynamoDB, EC2), 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, and 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
• Contribute across Nova's query execution engine and distributed compute layer: 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, such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
• Help ensure Nova's components support high-throughput automated query workloads — as AI agents become a primary source of queries, build for sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns at scale.
• Improve cost and performance
• Own and execute projects that reduce infrastructure cost — compute, storage, network, and memory — while maintaining or improving latency and throughput.
• Profile and optimize JVM performance: GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout decisions.
• Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries before they impact the system.
• Contribute to reliability and operational excellence
• Strengthen Nova's reliability posture in the components you own: identify failure modes, drive durable fixes, and raise the bar on how we detect and respond to production issues.
• Participate in on-call rotation to root-cause incidents and turn one-off fixes into lasting improvements.
• Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that keeps Nova healthy.
• Grow through technical contribution
• Lead the design and execution of multi-week to multi-month projects within your area of ownership.
• Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
• Pair with and learn from senior and staff engineers on the team; share what you learn with peers.
• Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova's capabilities translate into customer value.

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, and more
• Generous stipends to spend on what matters most to you, whether that’s wellness (monthly), commuter transit/parking (monthly), learning and development (quarterly), new hire home office equipment, and much more
• Excellent Parental benefits including: 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed