{"id":2526677,"url":"https://alion.io/job/amplitude-staff-software-engineer-query","title":"Staff Software Engineer (Query)","company":{"id":787,"name":"Amplitude","domain":"amplitude.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/amplitude","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Vancouver, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":141000,"max_usd":237000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":38},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EC2","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"DynamoDB","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"BigQuery","optional":true},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":true},{"name":"Google BigQuery","optional":true},{"name":"Presto","optional":true},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":true},{"name":"Trino","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-06T20:19:06Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-06","last_verified_at":"2026-10-14T16:00:29Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":7,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":7},"description":"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.\nAs 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.\nAbout the Role & Team\nEvery 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.\nWe’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.\nWe’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.\nThis 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.\nWhat You’ll Do\nBuild and evolve core query engine infrastructure\nWork across Nova's query execution engine and distributed compute layer: query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management.\n\nDesign and implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support more warehouse-imported data types, such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.\n\nDesign 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.\n\nDrive cost and performance at scale\nOwn and execute projects that materially reduce infrastructure cost - compute, storage, network, and memory - while maintaining or improving latency and throughput.\n\nProfile and optimize JVM performance: GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout decisions that compound at our scale.\n\nBuild guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries before they impact the system.\n\nImprove reliability and operational excellence\nStrengthen Nova’s reliability posture: identify systemic failure modes, drive durable fixes, and raise the bar on how we detect and respond to production issues.\n\nParticipate in on-call rotation to root-cause incidents and turn one-off fixes into architectural improvements.\n\nContribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that keeps Nova healthy.\n\nInfluence through technical leadership\nLead the design and execution of multi-month projects that improve Nova’s architecture, performance, or capabilities.\n\nContribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews - helping the team make principled tradeoffs.\n\nMentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking, production debugging, and system design.\n\nCollaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova’s capabilities translate into customer value.\n\nWho You Are\nYou are an experienced systems engineer who:\nGets energy from working deep inside a complex distributed system - understanding how data flows through it, where the bottlenecks are, and how to make it meaningfully better.\n\nHas built or significantly extended an OLAP engine, columnar database, query processor, or large-scale data processing system - not just operated one.\n\nThinks about cost, performance, and reliability as interconnected concerns, not separate workstreams.\n\nCommunicates clearly about technical tradeoffs and earns influence through the quality of your work and ideas, not through title.\n\nFinds it natural to help other engineers level up - through pairing, design reviews, or just being the person who explains the “why” behind a system’s design.\n\nQualifications\nRequirements\n7+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems.\n\nHands-on experience building or extending analytical/OLAP systems - query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, or equivalent.\n\nTrack record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale (compute, storage, network).\n\nStrong computer science fundamentals: distributed systems (partitioning, replication, consistency, failover), data structures and algorithms, concurrency and multi-threading, performance optimization.\n\nProduction experience with modern cloud infrastructure - AWS (S3, DynamoDB, EC2), Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform - or strong equivalents.\n\nProficiency in Java, C++, or Python.\n\nDemonstrated technical influence beyond your immediate team: leading design discussions, driving cross-team alignment, mentoring engineers.\n\nNice to Have\nExperience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.\n\nDeep JVM expertise - GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization at production scale.\n\nExperience with columnar data formats and encodings (Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats).\n\nFamiliarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems.\n\nContributions to open-source data infrastructure projects or published work in the data systems space.\n\nOur values:\nAt Amplitude, our values guide how we show up for one another and for our customers:\nHumility: We operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view.\n\nOwnership: We take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared company success.\n\nGrowth Mindset: We’re tenacious in the face of challenges and seek feedback in order to grow ourselves and others.\n\nCustomer Centricity: We put the customer at the center of everything we do and are deeply committed to their success.\n\nWe 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.\nSome of our benefit programs include:\nExcellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans\n\nFlexible time off, paid holidays, and more\n\nGenerous 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\n\nExcellent Parental benefits including: 12-20 weeks of Paid Parental Leave, Carrot Fertility Benefits/Adoption/Surrogacy support, Back-up Child Care support\n\nMental 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)\n\nEmployee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)\n\nOther fun facts about Amplitude:\nOur customers love us! They've said we're the #1 product analytics solution for 23 quarters in a row on G2.\n\nWe care a lot about product innovation. We've made significant investments in talent and infrastructure to build the most powerful AI analytics platform on the market.\n\nWe invest in our people. We offer mentorship programs, management training, and wellness initiatives.\n\nWe give back to our communities. We give every Ampliteer a charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off.\n\nWe were founded in 2012, went public via a direct listing in September 2021, and are now trading under the ticker $AMPL.\n\nWe’re a global and fast-growing team! We have employees around the world and offices in San Francisco (HQ), New York, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo.\n\nOur mascot is Data Monster, who loves to chow down on numbers, charts, and graphs. Nom nom.\n\nAmplitude provides equal employment opportunities (EEO). All applicants are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation.\nThis role is eligible for equity, benefits and other forms of compensation.\nOur values:\nAt Amplitude, our values guide how we show up for one another and for our customers:\nHumility: We operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view.\n\nOwnership: We take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared company success.\n\nGrowth Mindset: We’re tenacious in the face of challenges and seek feedback in order to grow ourselves and others.\n\nCustomer Centricity: We put the customer at the center of everything we do and are deeply committed to their success.\n\nWe 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.\nSome of our benefit programs include:\nExcellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans\n\n401(k) retirement plan with an employer match of up to 1% of your eligible pay each pay period up to $2,000 annually\n\nFlexible time off, paid holidays, and more\n\nGenerous stipends to spend on what matters most to you, whether that’s wellness (monthly), commuter transit/parking (monthly), learning and development (quarterly), new hire home office equipment, and much more\n\nExcellent Parental benefits including: 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave, Carrot Fertility Benefits/Adoption/Surrogacy support, Back-up Child Care support\n\nMental health and wellness benefits including no cost employee access to Modern Health coaching & therapy sessions\n\nEmployee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)\n\nOther fun facts about Amplitude:\nOur customers love us! They've said we're the #1 product analytics solution for 23 quarters in a row on G2.\n\nWe care a lot about product innovation. We've made significant investments in talent and infrastructure to build the most powerful AI analytics platform on the market.\n\nWe invest in our people. We offer mentorship programs, management training, and wellness initiatives.\n\nWe give back to our communities. We give every Ampliteer a charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off.\n\nWe were founded in 2012, went public via a direct listing in September 2021, and are now trading under the ticker $AMPL.\n\nWe’re a global and fast-growing team! We have employees around the world and offices in San Francisco (HQ), New York, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo.\n\nOur mascot is Data Monster, who loves to chow down on numbers, charts, and graphs. 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