Staff Software Engineer San Francisco, CA

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• Strengthen Nova’s reliability posture: identify systemic 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 architectural improvements.
• Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that keeps Nova healthy.
• 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 — helping the team make principled tradeoffs.
• Mentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking, production debugging, and system design.
• Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova’s capabilities translate into customer value.

Qualifications

• 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.