Staff Software Engineer, Database (OLAP and Columnar Storage)

Amplitude is a leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. More than 3,500 customers, including Atlassian, Jersey Mike’s, NBCUniversal, Shopify, and Under Armour, rely on Amplitude to gain self-service visibility into the entire customer journey. Amplitude guides companies every step of the way as they capture data they can trust, uncover clear insights about customer behavior, and take faster action. When teams understand how people are using their products, they can deliver better product experiences that drive growth. 

As an organization, we approach challenges with humility, take ownership of our contributions, and embrace a growth mindset that pushes us to constantly improve ourselves, each other, and the value we bring to customers and partners.

Amplitude’s Commitment to Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI): Amplitude believes that diversity enables the creation of better products, improves the ability to solve complex problems, and drives more powerful solutions. We strive to create an environment of inclusion—one focused on psychological safety, empathy, and human connection—that will allow employees of all backgrounds to thrive.

About The Role & Team

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help build our query engine and tackle big challenges in a fast-growing data company. Our engineers are leading the efforts to drive our large-scale distributed systems to the 10x level while making innovations to our industry-leading analytics capabilities. As a Staff engineer of the Query team, you will be responsible for designing, building, and operating the underlying distributed systems that power our core analytics product and other products(eg: experiments, CDP, session reply). You will be working at all layers of the query engine from the high-level analytics algorithms to the low-level distributed computation and storage layer. Our systems are based on the modern cloud stack e.g. AWS S3, DynamoDB, Redis/ElastiCache, Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, Java, C++, Python. You will be collaborating and sharing your ideas with a group of similarly innovative and curious engineers.

Our query engine (Nova) provides us with a competitive edge where we can provide customers with complex insights in real-time, using real-time data, and at a big data scale. A single larger query would require analyzing hundreds of billions of user events in real time. We achieved this by building an in-house OLAP database from the ground up, from the low-level distributed storage and computation layer to the high-level product analytics logic. Our design and architecture draw inspiration from many state-of-the-art systems in the big data space and we learned best practices from Druid, Scuba, Dremel, and other open-source projects(Apache Arrow, Apache IceBerg, etc) to build our own query engine. Check out our engineering blog to learn more.

 As a Staff Software Engineer, you will: 

• Take product ideas from ideation to implementation, develop components and services that expand the capabilities of our analytics product

• Scaling the infrastructure for our rapid data growth 

• Improving the system availability to be best in class

• Optimizing performance to be blazingly fast

• Lead engineering discussions and mentor others on engineering best practices

You'll be a great addition to the team if you have:

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science or another technical field

• 7+ years of industry experience in a Software Engineering role

• A strong foundation in multi-threading programming, data structures, algorithms, and software application design

• Passion about solving challenging problems and iterating quickly

• Strong communication skills and leadership

• Experience with Java, C++ or Python 

• Previous experience in distributed systems, data processing, and analytics 

Bonus Experience

• Deep understanding of OLAP system and hands-on experience

• Able to research a topic from papers and open source projects to come up with a solution to solve our problems. 

• Technical leadership of an engineering team

• Leading multi-quarter projects involving multiple engineers