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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's in-house OLAP engine, Nova, processes trillions of events in real time to power product analytics, experimentation, and decision-making for thousands of teams worldwide.
You will join the Infrastructure team as a Staff Software Engineer focused on Nova's query engine and distributed compute layer. This is a technical leadership role on a team of ~10 engineers where you'll drive meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale.
Key responsibilities include:
**Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure:** Work across Nova's query execution engine, distributed compute layer, query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management. Design and implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support 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, ensuring 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 including GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout decisions that compound at 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 by identifying systemic failure modes, driving durable fixes, and raising the bar on how the team detects and responds to production issues. Participate in on-call rotation to root-cause incidents and turn one-off fixes into architectural improvements. Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and operational tooling.
**Influence through technical leadership:** Lead the design and execution of multi-month projects that improve Nova's architecture, performance, or capabilities. Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews. Mentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking, production debugging, and system design. Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams.
**Requirements:**
- 7+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems
- Hands-on experience building or extending analytical/OLAP systems—query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, or equivalent
- Track record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale (compute, storage, network)
- 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
- Demonstrated technical influence beyond your immediate team: leading design discussions, driving cross-team alignment, mentoring engineers
**Nice to have:**
- Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar
- Deep JVM expertise—GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization at production scale
- Experience with columnar data formats and encodings (Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats)
- Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems
- Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects or published work in the data systems space
