Staff Software Engineer (Query Infrastructure)

Amplitude•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Amplitude is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for Query Infrastructure to build and improve Nova, its in-house OLAP engine. Nova processes trillions of events in real time and provides answers that power product decisions for enterprise customers and AI agents. The role owns significant parts of the OLAP system and its underlying infrastructure, including query execution, columnar storage, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure. The engineer will improve performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability, including designing elastic query infrastructure for AI agents and targeting 10× query throughput with predictable performance and lower cost per query. The role also sets technical direction for major initiatives, leads them from proposal through production, and works across engineering and product to establish priorities and navigate trade-offs. It includes production on-call responsibilities, incident investigation, architectural improvements, and helping senior engineers take on larger technical challenges through design reviews, debugging, and shared ownership.

Requirements

At least 8 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.
Track record of leading multi-month, cross-team technical projects from design through production, including significant cloud infrastructure cost or performance improvements.
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.
Ability to make sound trade-offs across performance, cost, correctness, and reliability and build support for technical decisions across teams.

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 of Nova 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, 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 to support its next order of magnitude in scale.
Work across engineering and product to set priorities and resolve trade-offs among capabilities, complexity, and cost.
Support senior engineers taking on larger technical problems through design reviews, debugging, and shared ownership.
Lead design discussions, drive cross-team alignment, and mentor engineers.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with 100% employer-paid employee premiums on select plans.
401(k) retirement plan with employer matching 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 benefits and adoption and surrogacy support.
Back-up child care support.
Mental health and wellness benefits, including no-cost employee access to Modern Health coaching and therapy sessions.
Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).
Charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off.
Equity and other forms of compensation.