Senior Software Engineer; Analytics Compute Platform team

About the Role & Team

Every chart, insight, and experiment result a customer sees in Amplitude passes through the compute layer that this team owns. Our team sits between Amplitude's front-end analytics products/ rest APIs/ MCPs and Nova, our proprietary analytics database, and owns the compute API that translates a user's question into a fast, correct answer.

Our mandate: enable a highly performant, reliable, and flexible way to compute insights. Those three goals are often in tension the more flexible we make the system, the harder it is to keep it fast and simple, and a lot of the interesting engineering work on this team lives in that tradeoff.

Day to day, you'll work closely with engineers on data management, marketing analytics, Session Replay, Experiment, CDP, Query, and various product teams, since they're all consumers of what we build.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will

• Design and build core parts of the query/compute engine that powers analysis across Amplitude's product suite
• Evolve the compute API and semantic layer that other engineering teams build features on top of, so that it can support a more generic table
• Help unify and evolve our core data model, including how non-event data (profile properties, lookup tables, etc.) is represented alongside event data
• Improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of query planning and execution on the Amplitude query engine
• Partner with teams across Session Replay, Experiment, CDP, Query, and frontend to understand their needs and shape the compute layer around them
• Take ownership of projects end-to-end, from design through rollout

You'll be a great addition to the team if you have

• Strong backend or distributed-systems engineering experience, ideally touching OLAP databases, query engines, or data infrastructure
• Experience with SQL, query planning/execution, or building APIs that many other engineering teams depend on
• Comfort reasoning about tradeoffs between flexibility, performance, and ease of use and making deliberate calls between them
• A track record of owning ambiguous, cross-team projects end-to-end rather than just executing well-scoped tickets
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills; this team's work only matters in the context of the products built on top of it

Bonus points for

• Experience with large-scale event or time-series data systems
• Experience designing semantic layers, ORMs, or other data-modeling abstractions
• Familiarity with columnar databases or OLAP query engines
• Experience integrating a data platform with external tools or AI/agent workflows

Example projects you might work on

• New compute schema and parallelization — redesigning how queries are represented internally to unlock faster, more parallelizable execution.
• Deeper session-based analysis — extending our session-analysis capabilities with new filters and formula support.
• Smarter result caching — improving both the actual and perceived speed of the query engine.
• Extending SQL as an interface into Amplitude's data lets AI agents, third-party tools, and warehouse-native workflows query Amplitude data directly and reliably. Paving the way for us to run directly on an external warehouse.
• Bringing non-event data into the core model — representing things like customer profile properties, sessions, and lookup tables alongside event data, so features can be built against a single consistent model quickly and computed efficiently.
• Data access controls, giving enterprise admins fine-grained control over who can access sensitive data, so they can confidently expand what they send into Amplitude and who can use it.