Staff Software Engineer (Query Infrastructure)

Amplitude is the leading AI analytics platform, helping over 5,200 customers—including Atlassian, Burger King, NBCUniversal, and Square—build better products and digital experiences. With powerful AI Agents embedded across our platform, teams can analyze, test, and optimize user experiences faster than ever. Ranked #1 across multiple categories in G2’s Winter 2026 Report, Amplitude is the best-in-class solution for product, data, and marketing teams. Learn more at amplitude.com http://amplitude.com. As an organization, we deliver for our customers by living our values. We operate from a place of humility, take ownership of problems and successes, approach challenges with a growth mindset, and put our customers at the center of everything we do. THE OPPORTUNITY 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. 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 tens of thousands of agents and product teams worldwide. 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 the engine internals and the infrastructure underneath. You'll own significant components of a modern OLAP system, across query execution, columnar storage, distributed compute, caching, and cloud infrastructure, and drive meaningful improvements to performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability. 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 enterprise customers. THE IMPACT YOU WILL DELIVER Build the next generation of Nova - Own core components across query execution, columnar storage, and distributed compute. - Design elastic query infrastructure for AI agents as first-class clients, targeting 10× query throughput with predictable performance and lower cost per query. - Solve deep performance problems across engine internals and cloud infrastructure, from JVM and memory optimization to distributed execution. - Own production reliability through on-call, incident investigation, and architectural improvements that prepare Nova for its next stage of growth. Shape what comes next - Set technical direction for major initiatives and lead them from proposal through production, with clear milestones and measurable results. - Decide what to build, what to adopt, and how to evolve Nova for its next order of magnitude in scale. - Work across engineering and product to set priorities and resolve trade-offs between capabilities, complexity, and cost. - Help senior engineers take on larger technical problems through design reviews, debugging, and shared ownership. WHO YOU ARE You are a systems-minded engineer who: - Gets energy from working inside complex distributed systems, finding bottlenecks, and making meaningful improvements. - Has built or significantly extended a query engine, storage engine, or distributed data processing system. - Makes sound trade-offs across performance, cost, correctness, and reliability, and builds support for technical decisions across teams. - Helps engineers take on harder problems through design reviews and debugging, while staying open to new ideas and learning from others. REQUIREMENTS - 8+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems. - Hands-on experience building or extending analytical or OLAP systems: query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing or streaming frameworks, or equivalent. - Track record of leading multi-month, cross-team technical projects from design through production, including significant cost or performance wins on cloud infrastructure. - Strong computer science fundamentals: distributed systems (partitioning, replication, consistency, failover), data structures and algorithms, concurrency, performance optimization. - Demonstrated technical influence beyond your immediate team: leading design discussions, driving cross-team alignment, mentoring engineers. - Proficiency in Java, C++ or Python. NICE TO HAVE - Experience with query or OLAP systems such as Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, Spark, BigQuery or Snowflake. - Experience with SQL planning and optimization, or with building SQL layers over heterogeneous storage. - Familiarity with open table and columnar formats (Iceberg, Parquet, Arrow, ORC) and warehouse-native architectures. - Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, event-driven data systems, or serving data to LLM and agent workloads. OUR VALUES: At Amplitude, our values guide how we show up for one another and for our customers: - Humility: We operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view. - Ownership: We take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared company success. - Growth Mindset: We’re tenacious in the face of challenges and seek feedback in order to grow ourselves and others. - Customer Centricity: We put the customer at the center of everything we do and are deeply committed to their success. 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 Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans - 401(k) retirement p