Staff Software Engineer

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 a Staff Software Engineer who wants to go deep on both the engine internals and the infrastructure underneath it. You’ll work across the full stack of a modern OLAP system — query planning and execution, columnar storage and encoding, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure — while driving meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability at scale. You’ll influence technical direction through your work, your design reviews, and your mentorship of other engineers on a team of ~10.

This role is ideal for someone who finds real satisfaction in making a complex distributed system faster, cheaper, and more reliable — and who wants to do that work on a system that directly powers the product experience for thousands of customers.

What You’ll Do

Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure 

• Work across Nova's query execution engine and distributed compute layer: query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management.
• Design and implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support more warehouse-imported data types, such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
• Design for high-throughput automated query workloads — as AI agents become a primary source of queries, ensure Nova’s architecture supports sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns at scale.

Drive cost and performance at scale

• Own and execute projects that materially 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 that compound at our scale.
• Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries before they impact the system.

Improve reliability and operational excellence

• Strengthen Nova’s reliability posture: identify systemic 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 architectural improvements.
• Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that keeps Nova healthy.