Amplitude
Senior Software Engineer (Query Infrastructure)
$165K–$276K
San Francisco · Hybrid · Senior · Full-time · Posted May 18, 2026
- Experience
- 4+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering.
About the job
Own and improve Nova, Amplitude’s OLAP engine and query infrastructure, focusing on throughput, performance, cost-efficiency, and production reliability.
What you'll do
- Build and own components across query execution, columnar storage, and distributed compute; design elastic query infrastructure for AI agents.
- Lead major technical initiatives from proposal through production and set technical direction for Nova’s growth.
- Improve production reliability through on-call, incident investigation, architectural changes, design reviews, and cross-team collaboration.
What they ask for
- 4+ 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 leading multi-month, cross-team technical projects from design through production, including significant cost or performance wins on cloud infrastructure.
- Strong distributed-systems and computer science fundamentals; demonstrated technical influence beyond the immediate team; 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, open table and columnar formats, warehouse-native architectures, product analytics, experimentation, or serving data to LLM and agent workloads.
Pay
$165,000 - $247,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission) USD (total pay); $183,000 - $276,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission) USD (total pay); $183,000 - $276,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission) USD (total pay); $165,000 - $247,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission) USD (total pay); $165,000 - $247,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission) USD (total pay)
Tools
Java, C++, Python, Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, Spark, BigQuery
AI focus
Design elastic query infrastructure for AI agents as first-class clients, targeting 10× query throughput with predictable performance and lower cost per query; the posting also mentions serving data to LLM and agent workloads as a nice-to-have.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative