Sr Software Engineer, Query

About the position

We're looking for a Sr 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 (e.g., 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.

Responsibilities

• Technical lead for projects/features that have high business impact
• Contribute to the technical direction of the team, product, and systems
• Lead performance optimization and scaling efforts
• Take product ideas from ideation to implementation
• Develop components and services that expand the capabilities of our analytics product
• Participate and collaborate with Product and Design Team to iterate on our product
• Lead engineering discussions and mentor others on engineering best practices
• Mentor and contribute to the success of junior engineers

Requirements

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science or another technical field
• 4+ years of industry experience in a Software Engineering role
• Strong foundation in programming, data structures, algorithms, and software application design
• Passionate about solving challenging problems and iterating quickly
• Experience with Java or C++ is a plus
• Previous experience in distributed systems, data processing and analytics is a plus
• Technical leadership of an engineering team is a plus

Nice-to-haves

• 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.
• Leading multi-quarter projects involving multiple engineers

Benefits

• Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans
• Flexible time off, paid 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)