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.

Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure

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