Software Engineering Manager
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 an Engineering Manager to lead the Query team through this inflection point. You’ll own the vision and roadmap for one of Amplitude’s most critical infrastructure pillars, lead a high-performing team of engineers, and make the strategic calls that balance today’s reliability with tomorrow’s ambition.
Requirements
- 2+ years leading engineers (people management and/or tech lead) and 6+ years building backend or infrastructure systems.
- Hands-on experience with distributed data systems — OLAP databases, data warehouses, stream processing, or large-scale storage — and modern cloud infrastructure (AWS S3, DynamoDB, Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform).
- A track record of meaningfully improving reliability, latency, or cost efficiency for a production system with clear SLOs and incident accountability.
- Strong communication skills and experience partnering with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to define roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
Nice To Haves
- Are drawn to hard problems at the intersection of query engines, distributed systems, and product impact — you’re as comfortable discussing storage layout as you are discussing customer outcomes.
- Lead with humility and ownership — you create environments where engineers take real ownership and grow their impact, and you hold yourself to the same standard.
- Think in systems and tradeoffs — you can frame a complex decision clearly, communicate it to a room of mixed stakeholders, and drive alignment.
- Stay technically close — you read design docs, engage in architectural decisions, and give your team the context and space to execute well.
Responsibilities
- Set the direction for the Query platform — define the roadmap, make priorities explicit, and align engineering, product, and cross-functional partners behind a clear plan.
- Lead and grow a team of ~10 engineers, partnering with your tech lead to define Nova's technical direction while coaching, developing, and scaling the team through hiring and performance feedback.
- Drive platform evolution across the query engine’s core layers — storage, compute and query execution — to define Amplitude’s next generation of analytics.
- Guide the design and operation of large-scale distributed systems, including load management, fault tolerance, capacity planning, and on-call practices. You own the SLOs g, and cost efficiency.
- Report to the Director of Data and partner across Product, Data Warehouse, Data Pipeline, Middleware, AI, and Support to co-define Amplitude's data strategy and shape how customers query and explore their data.
- Engage directly on major customer onboardings and escalations, turning customer learnings into durable platform improvements.
Benefits
- Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans
- 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), home office equipment (annual), and much more
- Excellent Parental benefits including: 12-20 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 and high quality physician office experience via One Medical membership (select U.S. locations only)
- Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
- Mentorship programs
- Management training
- Wellness initiatives
- Charitable giving grant
- Paid volunteer time off
- Equity
- Other forms of compensation
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Manager
Education Level
No Education Listed
