Amplitude
Senior Software Engineer
San Francisco, CA · Senior
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$131 more — $165,131 — moves this role to Level II and 2 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $165,131 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Green-card filing pattern in this occupation
Green-card follow-through: 67%
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
Community outcomes
No reports yet — be the first to help the next applicant.
About the role
- Ranked #1 across multiple categories in G2's Winter 2026 Report, Amplitude is the best-in-class solution for product, data, and marketing teams.
- About the Role & Team Every 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.
Responsibilities
- Build and improve core query engine components
- Implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support more warehouse-imported data types, such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
- Help ensure Nova's components support high-throughput automated query workloads - as AI agents become a primary source of queries, build for sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns at scale.
- Own and execute projects that reduce infrastructure cost - compute, storage, network, and memory - while maintaining or improving latency and throughput.
- Profile and optimize JVM performance: GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout decisions.
- Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries before they impact the system.
- Strengthen Nova's reliability posture in the components you own: identify failure modes, drive durable fixes, and raise the bar on how we detect and respond to production issues.
- Lead the design and execution of multi-week to multi-month projects within your area of ownership.
- Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews.
- Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova's capabilities translate into customer value.
Requirements
- 5+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with exposure to distributed data systems.
- Experience improving cost or performance on cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, network).
- Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure - AWS (S3, DynamoDB, EC2), Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform - or strong equivalents.
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
- You are a systems-minded engineer who:
- Requirements
- Hands-on experience building or extending distributed data systems - query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, streaming systems, storage engines, or equivalent
- Strong computer science fundamentals: distributed systems (partitioning, replication, consistency, failover), data structures and algorithms, concurrency and multi-threading, performance optimization.
- Demonstrated ability to own and ship significant pieces of complex systems, and to collaborate effectively with engineers and partner teams.
Nice to have
- Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
- JVM expertise - GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization.
- Experience with columnar data formats and encodings (Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats).
- Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems.
- Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects or published work in the data systems space.
- Humility: We operate from a place of empathy and openness, seeking to understand many points of view.
- Growth Mindset: We're tenacious in the face of challenges and seek feedback in order to grow ourselves and others.
- Other fun facts about Amplitude:
Compensation
- $183,000 - $276,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
- Based on legislation in California, the following details are for individuals who will work for Amplitude in California outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. California salary range: $165,000 - $247,000 total target cash (inclusive of bonus or commission)
Benefits
- Amplitude's Commitment to Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI):
Company info
- Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans
- 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match of up to 1% of your eligible pay each pay period up to $2,000 annually
- 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), new hire home office equipment, and much more
- Excellent Parental benefits including: 12 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
- Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
- 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.
- We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who wants to go deep on the engine internals and the infrastructure underneath.
- Our customers love us!
This listing is sourced directly from Amplitude's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.