Y Combinator Senior Software Engineer; Analytics Compute Platform team
Summary
Senior Software Engineer builds and optimizes the core query/compute engine that powers Amplitude’s analytics platform, working with SQL, OLAP systems, and distributed data infrastructure in San Francisco.
Amplitude is the leading AI analytics platform, helping over 4,700 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 .
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.
Amplitude’s Commitment to Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI): Amplitude believes that diversity enables the creation of better products, improves the ability to solve complex problems, and drives more powerful solutions. We strive to create an environment of inclusion—one focused on psychological safety, empathy, and human connection—that will allow employees of all backgrounds to thrive.
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.
Who We Are
The Company: Amplitude is filled with humble, life-long learners who are eager to help one another and the company succeed. Our values of growth mindset, ownership, and humility are core to the way we work: we’re tenacious in the face of challenges, we take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared success, and we operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view.
The Product: Amplitude is a digital analytics platform—we help companies capture data they can trust, uncover clear insights about customer behavior, and take faster action. This empowers teams to build better product experiences that drive business growth. We’re super proud of what we’ve built and continue to expand: a platform that empowers companies to thrive in the digital era.
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 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)
Other fun facts about Amplitude:
- We were recognized in the Newsweek Excellence Index 2024.
- Our customers love us! They've said we're the #1 product analytics solution for 19 quarters in a row on G2.
- We care A LOT about product innovation. Fast Company called us the #3 most innovative enterprise company in the world.
- We invest in our people. We offer mentorship programs, management training, and wellness initiatives.
- We give back to our communities. We give every Ampliteer a charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off.
- We were founded in 2012, went public via a direct listing in September 2021, and are now trading under the ticker $AMPL.
- We’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.
- Our mascot is Data Monster, who loves to chow down on numbers, charts, and graphs. Nom nom.
Amplitude 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.
This role is eligible for equity, benefits and other forms of compensation.
Based on legislation in California, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude California: California salary range: $167,000 - $230,000 base salary (inclusive of bonus or commission)
By applying for this job, you acknowledge that Amplitude processes your personal data in accordance with the Amplitude Applicant Privacy Notice.
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