Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer role at Amplitude based in San Francisco, CA (onsite). Compensation: USD 165,000 - 276,000 per year. This position centers on the Nova OLAP engine, owning query execution, columnar storage, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure to enhance performance, cost efficiency, and reliability for a large-scale analytics platform.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to Nova's query execution and distributed compute stack, including query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster level resource management.
• Develop new capabilities as Nova broadens support for additional warehouse-imported data types such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
• Ensure Nova components withstand high throughput automated query workloads, including queries from AI agents, by designing for sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns 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 through GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and informed data layout decisions.
• Build guardrails and observability to detect expensive or pathological queries before they impact system performance.
• Strengthen the reliability of owned Nova components by identifying failure modes, delivering durable fixes, and improving production issue detection and response.
• Participate in on-call rotations to root-cause incidents and transform one-off fixes into lasting improvements.
• Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that sustains Nova's health.
• Design and execute multi-week to multi-month projects within your area of ownership.
• Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
• Collaborate with senior and staff engineers to learn and share knowledge with peers through pairing and design discussions.
• Work with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova capabilities translate into customer value.

Requirements

• Minimum 3 years of professional experience in backend or infrastructure engineering with exposure to distributed data systems.
• Hands-on involvement in building or extending distributed data systems such as query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, streaming systems, or storage engines.
• Experience improving cost or 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.
• Demonstrated ability to own and ship substantial 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

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with premiums fully paid by the employer for employee plans on select options
• 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match of up to 1% of eligible pay per pay period, up to $2,000 annually
• Flexible time off, paid holidays, and additional benefits
• Generous stipends for wellness, commuter costs, learning and development, new hire home office equipment, and more
• Parental benefits including 12 weeks of paid parental leave, Carrot Fertility benefits for adoption or surrogacy, and backup childcare support
• Mental health and wellness benefits with no-cost access to Modern Health coaching and therapy sessions
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)

Who you are

• You enjoy working inside a complex distributed system, understanding data flow, bottlenecks, and ways to make it substantially better.
• 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 rather than isolated tasks.
• You communicate technical tradeoffs clearly and aim to influence through high-quality work and ideas.
• You value 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 engine systems such as Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar
• JVM expertise including GC tuning, profiling, and memory optimization
• Familiarity with columnar data formats and encodings such as Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats
• Knowledge of product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems
• Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects or related publications

Our Values

• Humility: We approach collaboration with empathy and openness, seeking diverse perspectives.
• Ownership: We take initiative to solve problems that advance the company’s success.
• Growth Mindset: We persist through challenges and welcome feedback to develop ourselves and others.
• Customer Centricity: The customer sits at the center of our decisions and actions.

Other Fun Facts About Amplitude

• Our customers rate us highly as the leading product analytics solution for 23 quarters running on G2.
• We invest in talent and infrastructure to build a powerful AI analytics platform and foster product innovation.
• We support mentorship, management training, and wellness initiatives to develop our people.
• We offer charitable giving grants and paid volunteer time off for all employees.
• Founded in 2012, we went public via direct listing in September 2021 and trade under the ticker AMPL.
• We are a global team with offices in multiple cities worldwide, including San Francisco (HQ), New York, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo.
• Our Data Monster mascot embodies our love for numbers, charts, and graphs.