Staff Software Engineer (Query)
Remote • Vancouver • FullTime
Posted 11d ago
Job Location
Vancouver
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Amplitude is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Query team, focusing on their in-house OLAP engine, Nova. This role is critical for powering AI agents that autonomously ship features and make prioritization calls by ensuring Nova can handle trillions of events in real-time. You will work across the full stack of this modern OLAP system, driving improvements in performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability. This is an opportunity to influence technical direction, mentor other engineers, and make a significant impact on a system that directly serves thousands of customers.
Responsibilities
- Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure, including query planning, columnar storage, encoding, compression, caching, and resource management.
- Design and implement new capabilities for Nova to support additional data types.
- Design for high-throughput automated query workloads to support AI agents.
- Own and execute projects to reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining or improving performance.
- Profile and optimize JVM performance, including GC tuning and memory management.
- Build guardrails and observability to prevent expensive or pathological queries.
- Strengthen Nova's reliability by identifying failure modes and driving fixes.
- Participate in on-call rotation to address incidents and implement architectural improvements.
- Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and operational tooling.
- Lead the design and execution of multi-month projects to improve Nova's architecture.
- Contribute to technical direction through design documents, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
- Mentor senior engineers on distributed systems, production debugging, and system design.
- Collaborate with other engineering teams to ensure Nova's capabilities translate to customer value.
Requirements
- 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).
- Track record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale.
- 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.