Senior Software Engineer, Amplitude

• 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
• 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
• 3+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with exposure to distributed data systems
• Hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems — query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, streaming systems, storage engines, or equivalent
• 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

Desirable

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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