Senior Software Engineer (Query)
$165k - $247k • Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 5mo ago
About the job
Amplitude is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join their Query team, focusing on their in-house OLAP engine, Nova. This role involves deep work on engine internals and underlying infrastructure, including query execution, columnar storage, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure. The engineer will drive improvements in performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability, directly impacting the product experience for thousands of enterprise customers. This position is ideal for someone who thrives on optimizing complex distributed systems and ensuring they are fast, cost-effective, and reliable.
Responsibilities
- Build and improve core query engine components, including query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding, compression, caching, and resource management.
- Implement new capabilities for Nova to support additional data types.
- Ensure Nova's components support high-throughput automated query workloads from AI agents.
- Own and execute projects to reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining or improving performance.
- Profile and optimize JVM performance, including garbage collection, memory management, and concurrency.
- Build guardrails and observability to prevent expensive or pathological queries.
- Strengthen Nova's reliability by identifying failure modes and driving durable fixes.
- Participate in on-call rotations to resolve incidents and implement lasting improvements.
- Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and operational tooling.
- Lead the design and execution of multi-week to multi-month projects.
- Contribute to technical direction through design documents, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
- Collaborate with other engineering teams to ensure Nova's capabilities translate into customer value.
Requirements
- Hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems (query engines, columnar storage, data processing frameworks, 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 in distributed systems, data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and performance optimization.
- Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, Terraform) or strong equivalents.
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
- Demonstrated ability to own and ship significant pieces of complex systems.