Software Engineering Manager

About the Role & Team

Every AI insight, every experiment, every cohort at Amplitude starts with a query. Our in-house OLAP engine, Nova, processes trillions of events in real time — turning raw behavioral data into fast, trustworthy answers that power decisions for thousands of product teams worldwide.

We’re entering a world where AI agents don’t just assist product teams — they ship features, run experiments, and make prioritization calls autonomously. What makes that possible is agents’ ability to verify their work against real product data continuously. That makes Nova the critical infrastructure in the loop, and as non-stop agents become the main source of queries, the demand on Nova’s throughput, correctness, and operational rigor grows dramatically.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Query team through this inflection point. You’ll own the vision and roadmap for one of Amplitude’s most critical infrastructure pillars, lead a high-performing team of engineers, and make the strategic calls that balance today’s reliability with tomorrow’s ambition.

What You’ll Do

• Set the direction for the Query platform — define the roadmap, make priorities explicit, and align engineering, product, and cross-functional partners behind a clear plan.
• Lead and grow a team of ~10 engineers, partnering with your tech lead to define Nova's technical direction while coaching, developing, and scaling the team through hiring and performance feedback.
• Drive platform evolution across the query engine’s core layers — storage, compute and query execution — to define Amplitude’s next generation of analytics.
• Guide the design and operation of large-scale distributed systems, including load management, fault tolerance, capacity planning, and on-call practices. You own the SLOs g, and cost efficiency.
• Report to the Director of Data and partner across Product, Data Warehouse, Data Pipeline, Middleware, AI, and Support to co-define Amplitude's data strategy and shape how customers query and explore their data.
• Engage directly on major customer onboardings and escalations, turning customer learnings into durable platform improvements.

You’ll Thrive Here If You

• Are drawn to hard problems at the intersection of query engines, distributed systems, and product impact — you’re as comfortable discussing storage layout as you are discussing customer outcomes.
• Lead with humility and ownership — you create environments where engineers take real ownership and grow their impact, and you hold yourself to the same standard.
• Think in systems and tradeoffs — you can frame a complex decision clearly, communicate it to a room of mixed stakeholders, and drive alignment.
• Stay technically close — you read design docs, engage in architectural decisions, and give your team the context and space to execute well.

What We’re Looking For