Senior Software Engineer

• 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.

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.

• Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
• JVM expertise — GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization.
• Experience with columnar data formats and encodings (Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats).
• Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems.
• Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects or published work in the data systems space.

At Amplitude, our values guide how we show up for one another and for our customers:

• Humility: We operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view.
• Ownership: We take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared company success.
• Growth Mindset: We’re tenacious in the face of challenges and seek feedback in order to grow ourselves and others.
• Customer Centricity: We put the customer at the center of everything we do and are deeply committed to their success.