Staff Software Engineer

Amplitude is the leading AI analytics platform, helping over 4,700 customers—including Atlassian, Burger King, NBCUniversal, and Square—build better products and digital experiences. With powerful AI Agents embedded across our platform, teams can analyze, test, and optimize user experiences faster than ever. Ranked #1 across multiple categories in G2’s Winter 2026 Report, Amplitude is the best-in-class solution for product, data, and marketing teams.

Every AI insight, every experiment, every cohort at Amplitude starts with a query. Our in-house OLAP engine, Nova, processes trillions of events in real time — turning raw behavioral data into fast, trustworthy answers that power decisions for thousands of product teams worldwide.

We’re entering a world where AI agents don’t just assist product teams — they ship features, run experiments, and make prioritization calls autonomously. What makes that possible is agents’ ability to verify their work against real product data continuously. That makes Nova the critical infrastructure in the loop, and as non-stop agents become the main source of queries, the demand on Nova’s throughput, correctness, and operational rigor grows dramatically.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer who wants to go deep on both the engine internals and the infrastructure underneath it. You’ll work across the full stack of a modern OLAP system — query planning and execution, columnar storage and encoding, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure — while driving meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale. You’ll influence technical direction through your work, your design reviews, and your mentorship of other engineers on a team of ~10.

• Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure: work across Nova's query execution engine and 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 more 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, ensure 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: GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout decisions that compound at our 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, participate in on-call rotation, contribute to capacity planning and safe rollout practices.
• Influence through technical leadership: lead design and execution of multi-month projects, contribute to technical direction through design docs and code reviews, mentor senior engineers.

• 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 and performance improvements in large-scale systems.