The role
From Amplitude's own posting.
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. Learn more at amplitude.com .
As an organization, we deliver for our customers by living our values. We operate from a place of humility, take ownership of problems and successes, approach challenges with a growth mindset, and put our customers at the center of everything we do.
Amplitude’s Commitment to Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI): Amplitude believes that diversity enables the creation of better products, improves the ability to solve complex problems, and drives more powerful solutions. We strive to create an environment of inclusion—one focused on psychological safety, empathy, and human connection—that will allow employees of all backgrounds to thrive.
About the Role & Team
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 Senior Software Engineer who wants to go deep on the engine internals and the infrastructure underneath. You'll own significant components of a modern OLAP system — across query execution, columnar storage and encoding, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure — and drive meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability. You'll grow your technical influence through the quality of your code, your design contributions, and your collaboration with other engineers on a team of ~10.
This role is ideal for someone who finds real satisfaction in making a complex distributed system faster, cheaper, and more reliable — and who wants to do that work on a system that directly powers the product experience for thousands of enterprise customers.
What You'll Do
Build and improve core query engine components
Contribute across Nova's query execution engine and distributed compute layer: query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management.
Implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support more warehouse-imported data types, such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
Help ensure Nova's components support high-throughput automated query workloads — as AI agents become a primary source of queries, build for sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns at scale.
Improve cost and performance
Own and execute projects that 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.
Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries before they impact the system.
Contribute to reliability and operational excellence
Strengthen Nova's reliability posture in the components you own: identify failure modes, drive durable fixes, and raise the bar on how we detect and respond to production issues.
Participate in on-call rotation to root-cause incidents and turn one-off fixes into lasting improvements.
Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that keeps Nova healthy.
Grow through technical contribution
Lead the design and execution of multi-week to multi-month projects within your area of ownership.
Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
Pair with and learn from senior and staff engineers on the team; share what you learn with peers.
Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova's capabilities translate into customer value.
Who You Are
You are a systems-minded engineer who:
Gets energy from working inside a complex distributed system — understanding how data flows through it, where the bottlenecks are, and how to make it meaningfully better.
Has hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems — query engines, columnar storage, streaming or batch data processing frameworks, storage engines, or equivalent.
Thinks about cost, performance, and reliability as interconnected concerns, not separate workstreams.
Communicates clearly about technical tradeoffs and is eager to grow your influence through the quality of your work and ideas.
Enjoys learning from teammates — and helping others through pairing, design reviews, or explaining the "why" behind a system's design.
Qualifications
Requirements
Hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems — query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, streaming systems, storage engines, or equivalent
5+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with exposure to distributed data systems.
Experience improving cost or performance on cloud infrastructure (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 ability to own and ship significant pieces of complex systems, and to collaborate effectively with engineers and partner teams.
Nice to Have
Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
JVM expertise — GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization.
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.
Our values:
At Amplitude, our values guide how we show up for one another and for our customers:
Humility: We operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view.
Ownership: We take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared company success.
Growth Mindset: We’re tenacious in the face of challenges and seek feedback in order to grow ourselves and others.
Customer Centricity: We put the customer at the center of everything we do and are deeply committed to their success.
We care about the well-being of our team: We offer competitive pay and benefits packages that reflect our commitment to the health and well-being of our Ampliteers.
Some of our benefit programs include:
Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans
401(k) retirement plan with an employer match of up to 1% of your eligible pay each pay period up to $2,000 annually
Flexible time off, paid holidays, and more
Generous stipends to spend on what matters most to you, whether that’s wellness (monthly), commuter transit/parking (mon