Backend Engineer (EST timezone)

Posthog1 weeks ago

Location

Remote

Workplace

Remote

Type

Full Time

Salary

USD 160,000 – 250,000

Level

Senior

Role

Backend Engineer

Posted

Jun 22, 2026

Full TimeRemoteSenior

The role

Summary

PostHog is hiring a Backend Engineer for their APM team to build observability systems (Logs, Traces, Metrics) that process petabytes of data. You'll own product areas end-to-end, design distributed systems for cost-effective data ingestion and retrieval at scale, and work with high-throughput data processing technologies. This role requires experience with scalable event-driven systems, data lifecycle management, and languages like Node.js, Go, or Rust, with familiarity in Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, and similar distributed data platforms.

What you'll do

Design and Build Petabyte-Scale Data Systems: Architect and implement observability infrastructure (Logs, Traces, Metrics) capable of ingesting, storing, and retrieving enormous volumes of telemetry data efficiently. You'll make critical architecture decisions that directly impact customer success and platform reliability, working in the hot path where your code determines data accessibility and system performance.

Own Product Areas End-to-End: Take full ownership of observability product features from alpha through beta to general availability. You'll drive the complete lifecycle including design, implementation, deployment, and optimization without external hand-holding, making autonomous decisions that shape the product direction.

Optimize Data Ingestion and Retrieval at Scale: Engineer solutions for cost-aware data storage and retrieval that balance throughput, query performance, and infrastructure costs. You'll work across the full data lifecycle to ensure petabyte-scale operations remain financially sustainable while maintaining sub-second query response times.

Build Distributed Event-Driven Systems: Design and implement highly scalable, event-driven distributed systems using technologies like Kafka for streaming, ClickHouse for analytics, PostgreSQL for transactional data, Redis for caching, and S3 for object storage. You'll make informed decisions about technology selection based on specific use case requirements.

Collaborate Across Three Products: Work across Logs, Traces, and Metrics products while going deep on one specialization. You'll coordinate with other engineers and product teams to ensure coherent architecture decisions and maintain consistency across the observability suite.

Ship High-Quality Code Rapidly: Deploy changes quickly while maintaining reliability and data integrity. You'll follow PostHog's fast-shipping philosophy while ensuring quality standards, leveraging async communication and pull request-driven development.

Handle On-Call and Incident Response: Participate in on-call rotations, respond to production incidents affecting petabyte-scale data systems, and implement post-incident improvements to prevent recurrence and improve system resilience.

What we look for

Technical

Highly Scalable Distributed Systems ExperienceProven expertise designing and building event-driven distributed systems that operate at significant scale with petabyte-level data volumes, understanding concepts like eventual consistency, fault tolerance, and data replication.

Full Data Lifecycle Management at ScaleDeep experience across data ingestion pipelines, storage optimization, and efficient retrieval systems. Must demonstrate understanding of query performance optimization, cost-aware architecture decisions, and balancing throughput with storage efficiency at enterprise scale.

Programming Languages: Node.js, Go, Rust, or EquivalentStrong proficiency in at least one of Node.js, Go, Rust, or similar systems programming languages. Experience with both high-level and lower-level languages preferred, as PostHog uses a mixture for different performance requirements.

Production Experience with Distributed Data PlatformsHands-on production experience with Kafka for event streaming, ClickHouse for analytics databases, PostgreSQL for relational data, Redis for in-memory caching, and S3 or similar object storage systems. Must understand trade-offs and optimal use cases for each technology.

Multi-Tenant SaaS ArchitectureExperience building and operating multi-tenant SaaS systems with proper data isolation, resource management, fair usage policies, and tenant-aware optimization. Understanding of tenant blast radius mitigation and SaaS-specific operational concerns required.

Greenfield Problem Solving and AutonomyDemonstrated ability to take ambiguous, unstructured problems with no predefined solution, frame them properly, develop a strategy, and execute independently without requiring detailed guidance or hand-holding from others.

Reliable Shipping at SpeedTrack record of shipping changes quickly and frequently to production without compromising reliability, data integrity, or system stability. Experience with rapid iteration while maintaining zero or near-zero data loss.

Education

Computer Science or Related Field (Bachelor's or Equivalent)Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent professional experience. Self-taught engineers with strong portfolios demonstrating the required technical capabilities are encouraged to apply.

Experience

High-Throughput Data Systems3+ years working with high-throughput data processing systems, observability platforms, log aggregation engines, metric collection systems, or streaming/batch processing pipelines. Prior contributions to analytics or data infrastructure valued.

Production Infrastructure at Scale2+ years operating production systems handling significant data volumes (terabyte+ scale). Experience managing cost implications of data storage and retrieval, as well as system performance optimization under load.

Distributed Systems Architecture3+ years designing and implementing distributed systems, including experience with trade-offs between consistency models, replication strategies, and architectural patterns for scalability and fault tolerance.

Skills

Required skills

Kafka and Event StreamingProduction experience with Apache Kafka including topics, partitions, consumer groups, retention policies, and architecture considerations for high-throughput streaming applications.

ClickHouse or Analytics DatabasesWorking knowledge of column-oriented databases like ClickHouse, including query optimization, data compression, and analytics-specific performance tuning at scale.

PostgreSQL Administration and PerformanceOperational experience with PostgreSQL including indexing strategies, query optimization, connection pooling, replication, and performance troubleshooting in production environments.

Distributed System Design PrinciplesUnderstanding of CAP theorem, eventual consistency, consensus algorithms, idempotency, request deduplication, and architectural patterns for building resilient distributed systems.

Performance Profiling and OptimizationAbility to identify performance bottlenecks using profiling tools, analyze algorithmic complexity, and optimize code and queries for production workloads.

Cloud Infrastructure and DevOpsExperience with AWS or similar cloud providers, containerization with Docker/Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and operational runbooks.

Nice to have

OpenTelemetry and ObservabilityFamiliarity with OpenTelemetry standards, structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics collection, and observability best practices for production systems.

Log Aggregation and Tracing SystemsPrior experience building or operating log aggregation systems (similar to ELK, Datadog, New Relic) or distributed tracing platforms (Jaeger, Zipkin, Tempo).

On-Call and Incident ManagementExperience in on-call rotations, incident response procedures, post-incident reviews (blameless postmortems), and implementing system improvements from incidents.

Benchmarking and Load TestingExperience designing and running benchmarks, load testing, chaos engineering, and stress testing to validate system performance and failure modes.

Rust for Systems ProgrammingProficiency with Rust for high-performance, memory-safe systems programming, particularly for data processing or infrastructure components.

Data Warehouse ArchitectureExperience with data warehouse design, ETL pipelines, fact/dimension tables, and analytical query optimization.

Compensation & benefits

Salary

USD 160,000 – 250,000 (annual)

Stock options

Available

Benefits

Equity and Stock Options

Meaningful equity packages as part of compensation, allowing you to participate in PostHog's upside. The company is well-funded with $100M+ raised from top-tier investors and has strong fundamentals (10% MoM revenue growth, profitable operations).

Fully Remote Work Environment

Work from anywhere with flexible timezone arrangements. PostHog is natively remote with async-first communication culture. Tuesday and Thursday meeting-free days ensure uninterrupted building time.

Async-First Culture with Maker Schedule

Protected focus time for deep technical work. Communication prioritizes pull requests over meetings, with most decisions documented and shareable. This environment minimizes context-switching and maximizes productive coding hours.

Autonomy and Ownership

Take complete ownership of product areas end-to-end from conception through launch. Engineers lead product teams and make product decisions. Flexible team structures that adapt to your interests and impact opportunities.

Complete Transparency

Access to company roadmap, strategy, revenue metrics, board meeting notes, and fundraising plans. Public company handbook documents how PostHog operates, pays people, and approaches challenges. Every employee has the context needed for good decision-making.

Fast-Shipping Culture

Work in an environment optimized for rapid iteration and frequent deployments. Small autonomous teams own their products end-to-end and ship at a pace that outpaces much larger competitors.

Ambitious Problem-Solving

Work on genuinely difficult challenges at petabyte scale without toy problems. You'll solve real infrastructure and data engineering problems that directly impact how companies understand their software.

Company Financial Stability

PostHog is 'default alive' with profitable operations and 10% month-over-month revenue growth. Well-funded with $100M+ from top-tier investors, providing security and runway for long-term product development.

Learning and Growth

Work with talented engineers on cutting-edge distributed systems problems. Exposure to petabyte-scale system design, observability infrastructure, and multi-tenant SaaS architecture at one of the fastest-growing developer tools companies.

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