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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 AI-powered insights.
You'll 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 becomes even more vital. This Staff role focuses on both engine internals and the infrastructure underneath, working across the full stack of a modern OLAP system.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure: work on query planning and execution, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management. Design new capabilities as Nova expands to support warehouse-imported data types like metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
- Design for high-throughput automated query workloads: ensure Nova's architecture supports sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns at scale as AI agents become primary query sources.
- Drive cost and performance improvements: execute projects that materially reduce infrastructure costs (compute, storage, network, memory) while maintaining or improving latency and throughput. Profile and optimize JVM performance including GC tuning, memory management, and concurrency. Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries.
- Improve reliability and operational excellence: identify systemic failure modes, drive durable fixes, and raise the bar on production issue detection and response. Participate in on-call rotation to root-cause incidents and turn fixes into architectural improvements. Contribute to capacity planning and safe rollout practices.
- Influence through technical leadership: lead multi-month projects improving 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 across Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other teams.
You're an experienced systems engineer with 7+ years in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems. You've built or significantly extended OLAP engines, columnar databases, query processors, or large-scale data processing systems. You have a track record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale and strong computer science fundamentals in distributed systems. You find energy in understanding complex systems deeply, identifying bottlenecks, and making meaningful improvements. You think about cost, performance, and reliability as interconnected concerns and naturally help other engineers level up.
