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Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

San Francisco, CA

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

Who We Are

The Company: Amplitude is filled with humble, life-long learners who are eager to help one another and the company succeed. Our values of growth mindset, ownership, and humility are core to the way we work: we’re tenacious in the face of challenges, we take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared success, and we operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view. 

 

The Product: Amplitude is a digital analytics platform—we help companies capture data they can trust, uncover clear insights about customer behavior, and take faster action. This empowers teams to build better product experiences that drive business growth. We’re super proud of what we’ve built and continue to expand: a platform that empowers companies to thrive in the digital era.

 

We care about the well-being of our team: We offer competitive pay and benefits packages that reflect our commitment to the health and well-being of our Ampliteers.

 

Some of our benefit programs include:

  • Excellent ​M​edical, ​D​ental and ​V​ision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee ​M​edical, ​D​ental,​ ​​​​​​​​Vision on select plans
  • Flexible time off, ​p​aid holidays, and more
  • Generous stipends to spend on what matters most to you, whether that’s wellness (monthly), commuter transit/parking (monthly), learning and development (quarterly), home office equipment (annual), and much more
  • Excellent Parental benefits including​:​ 12-20 weeks of Paid Parental Leave, Carrot Fertility Benefits/Adoption/Surrogacy support, Back-up Child Care support 
  • Mental health and wellness benefits including no cost employee access to Modern Health coaching & therapy Sessions and high quality physician office experience via One Medical membership (select U.S. locations only)
  • Employee Stock Purchase Program​ (ESPP)​

 

Other fun facts about Amplitude: 

#LI-JJ1

#LI-Hybrid

 

"This role is eligible for equity, benefits and other forms of compensation.

Based on Colorado law, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in Colorado. Colorado range: $185,000 - $278,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)

Based on legislation in New York City, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in New York City. New York City salary range: $204,000 - $307,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)

Based on legislation in California, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in San Francisco Bay Area of California. Salary range: $204,000 - $307,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)

Based on legislation in California, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in California outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. California salary range: $185,000 - $278,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)

Based on legislation in Washington state, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in Washington state. Washington salary range: $185,000 - $278,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)

Based on legislation in Washington state, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in Washington only: unlimited PTO, 10 to 13 holidays annually (will vary), medical dental and vision PPO and CDHP plans. Finally, a company sponsored 401(k) retirement plan."                    
                    

By applying for this job, you acknowledge that Amplitude processes your personal data in accordance with the Amplitude Applicant Privacy Notice.

Staying Safe - Protect Yourself From Recruitment Fraud
We are aware of individuals and entities fraudulently representing themselves as Amplitude recruiters and/or hiring managers. Amplitude will never ask for financial information or payment, or for personal information such as bank account number or social security number during the job application or interview process. Any emails from the Amplitude recruiting team will come from an @amplitude.com email address. You can learn more about how to protect yourself from these types of fraud by referring to this article. Please exercise caution and cease communications if something feels suspicious about your interactions.

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Demographic Questions - United States

To help hold ourselves accountable to our diversity and inclusion objectives, and for government reporting purposes, please take a few moments to complete the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

Why is Amplitude collecting demographic data? What is Amplitude trying to achieve by collecting this data?

Collecting demographic data is part of our commitment to inclusivity and fairness in the hiring process. Amplitude has made a commitment that all candidates experience a fair and equitable hiring process. As a data-driven company, we believe you can’t improve something if you can’t measure it. We are implementing methods to measure fairness in the Amplitude hiring process, and we need demographic data from applicants to achieve these goals. 

As set forth in Amplitude's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

 

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