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Amplitude is a leading AI analytics platform serving over 4,700 customers including Atlassian, Burger King, NBCUniversal, and Square. The company helps product, data, and marketing teams analyze, test, and optimize user experiences using embedded AI agents.
You will join the infrastructure team responsible for Nova, Amplitude's in-house OLAP engine that processes trillions of events in real time. As AI agents increasingly become autonomous sources of queries—shipping features, running experiments, and making prioritization decisions—Nova's role as critical infrastructure grows more demanding. The system must handle dramatically increased throughput, maintain correctness, and operate with high reliability.
In this Staff Software Engineer role, you will work across the full stack of a modern OLAP system: query planning and execution, columnar storage and encoding, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure. You'll drive meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale while influencing technical direction through design work, architecture discussions, and mentorship of a team of approximately 10 engineers.
Key responsibilities include building and evolving core query engine infrastructure—designing new capabilities as Nova expands to support warehouse-imported data types like metrics, profiles, and dimensions, and architecting for high-throughput automated query workloads. You'll own projects that materially reduce infrastructure costs across compute, storage, network, and memory while maintaining or improving latency and throughput. You'll profile and optimize JVM performance, including GC tuning, memory management, and concurrency decisions that compound at scale.
You'll strengthen Nova's reliability posture by identifying systemic failure modes, driving durable fixes, and raising operational excellence standards. Participation in on-call rotation, root-cause analysis of incidents, and architectural improvements are part of the role. You'll contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and operational tooling.
Leadership is central: you'll lead multi-month projects improving Nova's architecture, performance, or capabilities; contribute to technical direction through design docs and code reviews; mentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking and production debugging; and collaborate across Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to translate Nova's capabilities into customer value.
