engineering
Posted Apr 17Staff Software Engineer
at Amplitude
San Francisco, United StatesHybrid
Responsibilities
- Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure
- Design and implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support more warehouse-imported data types, such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
- Design for high-throughput automated query workloads — as AI agents become a primary source of queries, ensure Nova’s architecture supports sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns at scale.
- Drive cost and performance at scale
- Own and execute projects that materially 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 that compound at our scale.
- Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries before they impact the system.
- Improve reliability and operational excellence
- Strengthen Nova’s reliability posture: identify systemic failure modes, drive durable fixes, and raise the bar on how we detect and respond to production issues.
- Lead the design and execution of multi-month projects that improve Nova’s architecture, performance, or capabilities.
- Mentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking, production debugging, and system design.
- Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova’s capabilities translate into customer value. Who You Are
- Track record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale (compute, storage, network).
Requirements
- Amplitude is the leading AI analytics platform, helping over 4,700 customers—including Atlassian, Burger King, NBCUniversal, and Square—build better products and digital experiences.
- With powerful AI Agents embedded across our platform, teams can analyze, test, and optimize user experiences faster than ever.
- Every AI insight, every experiment, every cohort at Amplitude starts with a query.
- We’re entering a world where AI agents don’t just assist product teams — they ship features, run experiments, and make prioritization calls autonomously.
- We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer who wants to go deep on both the engine internals and the infrastructure underneath it.
- You’ll work across the full stack of a modern OLAP system — query planning and execution, columnar storage and encoding, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure — while driving meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale.
- Work across Nova's query execution engine and distributed compute layer: query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management.
- Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews — helping the team make principled tradeoffs.
- experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems. Hands-on
- 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.
- Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
- Experience with columnar data formats and encodings (Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats).
- Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems.
- Our customers love us! They've said we're the #1 product analytics solution for 23 quarters in a row on G2.
- We care a lot about product innovation. We've made significant investments in talent and infrastructure to build the most powerful AI analytics platform on the market.
Experience
- 7+ years of industry
Benefits
- Amplitude’s Commitment to Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI): Amplitude believes that diversity enables the creation of better products, improves the ability to solve complex problems, and drives more powerful solutions.
- We care about the well-being of our team: We offer competitive pay and
- benefits packages that reflect our commitment to the health and well-being of our Ampliteers.
- 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
- We give back to our communities. We give every Ampliteer a charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off.
- This role is eligible for equity,
- benefits and other forms of compensation.
- Based on Colorado law, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in Colorado. Colorado range: $198,000 - $299,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
- New York City salary range: $220,000 - $331,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
- Salary range: $220,000 - $331,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
- California salary range: $198,000 - $299,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
- Washington salary range: $198,000 - $299,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
- Based on legislation in Washington state, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in Washington only: unlimited PTO, 10 to 13 holidays annually (will vary), medical dental and vision PPO and CDHP plans.
- Finally, a company sponsored 401(k) retirement plan.
Contact
- Learn more at amplitude.com .
- Any emails from the Amplitude recruiting team will come from an @ amplitude.com email address.
Additional details
- Ranked #1 across multiple categories in G2’s Winter 2026 Report, Amplitude is the best-in-class solution for product, data, and marketing teams.
- As an organization, we deliver for our customers by living our values.
- We operate from a place of humility, take ownership of problems and successes, approach challenges with a growth mindset, and put our customers at the center of everything we do.
- We strive to create an environment of inclusion—one focused on psychological safety, empathy, and human connection—that will allow employees of all backgrounds to thrive.
- 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.
- 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.
- You’ll influence technical direction through your work, your design reviews, and your mentorship of 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 customers. What You’ll Do