Senior Software Engineer

Amplitude is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help advance the Nova OLAP engine from our San Francisco campus. In this onsite role, you’ll own critical aspects of query execution, columnar storage, and the distributed compute stack, while shaping caching strategies and cloud infrastructure to boost performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability for a large-scale analytics platform. The compensation for this position ranges from USD 165,000 to 276,000 per year.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate across Nova's query execution and distributed compute layers, covering query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression techniques, caching approaches, and cluster-wide resource management.
• Develop new capabilities as Nova broadens support for additional warehouse-imported data types, including metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
• Ensure Nova remains capable of handling high-throughput automated query workloads, anticipating AI-driven queries and designing for sustained concurrency and programmatic access at scale.
• Lead initiatives to reduce infrastructure costs across compute, storage, network, and memory while maintaining or improving latency and throughput.
• Profile and optimize JVM performance, focusing on garbage collection tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout decisions.
• Build guardrails and observability to detect expensive or pathological queries before they affect system performance.
• Improve the reliability posture of Nova components you own by identifying failure modes, delivering durable fixes, and enhancing productionIssue detection and response.
• Participate in on-call rotations to root-cause incidents and translate one-off fixes into lasting improvements.
• Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that keeps Nova healthy.
• Design and execute multi-week to multi-month projects within your domain of ownership.
• Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
• Pair with and learn from senior and staff engineers, then share insights with peers.
• Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova capabilities translate into customer value.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience in backend or infrastructure engineering with exposure to distributed data systems.
• Hands-on work building or extending distributed data systems such as query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, streaming systems, or storage engines.
• Experience reducing cost or improving performance on cloud infrastructure, including compute, storage, and network.
• Strong computer science fundamentals in distributed systems (partitioning, replication, consistency, failover), data structures and algorithms, concurrency and multi-threading, and performance optimization.
• Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure such as AWS (S3, DynamoDB, EC2), Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform, or strong equivalents.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
• Proven ability to own and deliver significant components of complex systems and collaborate effectively with engineers and partner teams.

Technologies

• Nova, AWS, S3, DynamoDB, EC2
• Kafka, Redis, ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform
• Java, C++, Python
• Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake
• Arrow, Parquet, ORC

Benefits

• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage with employee premiums fully paid on select plans.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match up to 1% of eligible pay, up to $2,000 annually.
• Flexible time off, paid holidays, and additional benefits.
• Generous stipends for wellness, commuting, learning and development, home office needs, and more.
• Parental benefits including 12 weeks of paid leave, Carrot Fertility support, and backup child care.
• Mental health and wellness support with no-cost access to Modern Health coaching and therapy sessions.
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).

Who you are

• You thrive inside complex distributed systems, understanding data flows, bottlenecks, and how to drive meaningful improvements.
• You have hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems such as query engines, columnar storage, streaming or batch processing frameworks, or storage engines.
• You view cost, performance, and reliability as interconnected concerns and communicate tradeoffs clearly.
• You articulate technical choices effectively and seek to influence the project through high-quality work and ideas.
• You enjoy learning from teammates and helping others through pairing, design reviews, or explaining the rationale behind system designs.

Nice to have

• Experience with OLAP or query engines such as Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
• JVM specialization including GC tuning, profiling, and memory optimization.
• Familiarity with columnar formats and encodings like Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or related formats.
• Knowledge of product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems.
• Open-source contributions or published work in data infrastructure.

Our values

• Humility: operate with empathy and openness to diverse perspectives.
• Ownership: take initiative to tackle problems that advance the company’s success.
• Growth Mindset: stay persistent, seek feedback, and help others grow.
• Customer Centricity: place the customer's success at the center of decisions and actions.

Other fun facts about Amplitude

• Our customers consistently rate us as the leading product analytics solution, boasting 23 consecutive quarters on G2.
• Significant investments in talent and infrastructure aim to build a powerful AI analytics platform.
• We support mentorship, management training, and wellness initiatives across the team.
• Amplitude provides charitable giving grants and paid volunteer time off for employees.
• Founded in 2012, went public via direct listing in September 2021 and trades under the ticker AMPL.
• We operate globally with offices in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo.
• Our Data Monster mascot embodies our love for numbers, charts, and graphs.