Staff Software Engineer

About the role

You will join the team responsible for Nova, our internal OLAP engine that processes trillions of events in real time. This role focuses on scaling our infrastructure to support autonomous AI agents that rely on our data for continuous verification and decision-making.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Develop and maintain core query engine components, including query planning, columnar storage, encoding, compression, and resource management.
• Architect Nova to handle high-throughput, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns generated by AI agents.
• Execute projects to reduce infrastructure costs across compute, storage, memory, and network while maintaining performance.
• Perform JVM tuning, including memory management and garbage collection optimization.
• Build observability tools and guardrails to identify and prevent expensive or pathological queries.
• Strengthen system reliability by identifying failure modes, performing root-cause analysis, and participating in on-call rotations.
• Lead technical design, conduct code reviews, and mentor senior engineers on distributed systems architecture.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional experience in backend or infrastructure engineering with a focus on distributed data systems.
• Proven track record of building or extending analytical/OLAP engines, columnar databases, or large-scale data processing frameworks.
• Experience optimizing cloud infrastructure costs at scale.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems concepts such as partitioning, consistency, replication, and failover.
• Production experience with cloud technologies including AWS (S3, DynamoDB, EC2), Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
• Ability to lead cross-team initiatives and mentor technical staff.

Nice to have

• Experience with Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, or Snowflake.
• Advanced JVM expertise regarding memory optimization and profiling.
• Familiarity with columnar formats like Arrow, Parquet, or ORC.
• Background in product analytics, event-driven systems, or experimentation platforms.
• Contributions to open-source data infrastructure.

Skills & tools

• Distributed systems design, OLAP engines, JVM tuning, AWS, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, Terraform, Java, C++, Python.

Practical notes

• Compensation: San Francisco Bay Area total target cash range is $220,000 to $331,000 (inclusive of bonus/commission).
• Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision insurance with 100% employer-paid premiums on select plans, flexible time off, paid parental leave (12-20 weeks), fertility support, mental health coaching via Modern Health, One Medical membership, and an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• Additional perks include monthly wellness and commuter stipends, quarterly learning stipends, and annual home office equipment support.