Staff Software Engineer (Query)
$198k - $299k • Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 11d ago
Job Location
San Francisco
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 will autonomously ship features, run experiments, and make prioritization calls. You will work across the full stack of a modern OLAP system, including query planning and execution, columnar storage, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure. The goal is to drive significant improvements in performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale, ensuring Nova can handle the increasing demand from non-stop AI agents. This position offers the opportunity to influence technical direction, mentor other engineers, and make a tangible impact on a system that serves thousands of customers.
Responsibilities
- Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure, including query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding, compression, caching, and cluster-level 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 as a primary query source.
- Own and execute projects to reduce infrastructure costs (compute, storage, network, memory) while maintaining or improving performance.
- Profile and optimize JVM performance, including GC tuning, memory management, and concurrency.
- Build guardrails and observability to prevent expensive or pathological queries.
- Strengthen Nova's reliability by identifying failure modes, driving fixes, and improving incident detection and response.
- Participate in on-call rotation to resolve 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 enhance Nova's architecture, performance, or capabilities.
- Contribute to technical direction through design documents, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
- Mentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking, production debugging, and system design.
- Collaborate with other engineering teams to ensure Nova's capabilities translate into 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, or equivalent).
- 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 equivalents).