Product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, data warehouse, CDP, surveys. PostHog does that.
Backend Engineer
Location
United States
Posted
3 days ago
Salary
0
Seniority
Senior
Job Description
Backend Engineer
PostHog
• You'll help build PostHog's observability suite: Logs (live and growing fast), Traces (in alpha), and Metrics (landing soon); the products that let our customers, and their AI agents, understand, debug, and self-heal their own software. • This is the foundation for self-driving, self-healing products, and we're building most of it from scratch. The core challenge is easy to say and hard to do: ingest, store, and retrieve enormous volumes of telemetry; fast, reliably, and cost-effectively. Getting data in is the easy half; getting it back out efficiently at petabyte scale, without melting the infra bill, is the real game. We're already handling terabytes of data and it's growing! • You won't be maintaining a corner of someone else's system. You'll own a product area end-to-end, taking it from alpha -> beta -> GA, making the architecture calls, and shipping in the hot path where your code decides whether customers have a good day. You'll work across all three products and go deep on one.
Job Requirements
- Experience with highly scalable, event-driven distributed systems
- Strong across the full data lifecycle at scale, ingestion and efficient, cost-aware storage & retrieval (query/storage performance matters as much as throughput)
- Experience with Node.JS, Go, Rust, or similar
- You've worked at scale with systems like Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Redis, or S3
- You can take an ambiguous, greenfield problem, frame it properly, and drive it forward without hand-holding
- You've worked with multi-tenant SaaS
- You ship changes quickly without breaking things
Benefits
- Transparency: Everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, our strategy, and how we work, in our public company handbook. Internally, we share revenue, notes and slides from board meetings, and fundraising plans, so everyone has the context they need to make good decisions.
- Autonomy: We don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what's going to have the biggest impact on our customers, and what they find interesting and motivating to work on. Engineers lead product teams and make product decisions. Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed.
- Shipping fast: Why not now? We want to build a lot of products; we can't do that shipping at a normal pace. We've built the company around small teams – autonomous, highly-efficient groups of cracked engineers who can outship much larger companies because they own their products end-to-end.
- Time for building: Nothing gets shipped in a meeting. We're a natively remote company. We default to async communication – PRs > Issues > Slack. Tuesdays and Thursdays are meeting-free days, and we prioritize heads down building time over perfect coordination. This will be the most productive job you've ever had.
- Ambition: We want to solve big problems. We strongly believe that aiming for the best possible upside, and sometimes missing, is better than never trying. We're optimistic about what's possible and our ability to get there.
- Being weird: Weird means redesigning an already world-class website for the 5th time. It means shipping literally every product that relates to customer data. It means building an objectively unnecessary developer toy with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it's fun.
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