Backend Engineer

We’re equipping every developer to build successful products by giving them a suite of products to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features. We currently offer product and web analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, a CDP, SQL access, a data warehouse, and LLM observability… and there’s plenty more to come.

PostHog was created as an open-source project during Y Combinator's W20 cohort. We had the most successful B2B software launch on HackerNews since 2012 with a product that was just 4 weeks old. Since then, more than 100,000 companies have installed the platform. We've had huge success with our paid upgrades, raised bags of money from some of the world's top investors, and have extremely strong product-led growth – 97% driven by word of mouth. 

We're growing quickly, but sustainably. We're also default alive, averaging 10% monthly revenue growth and with more than $20m ARR. We're staying focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring a handful of exceptional team members, and seeing fantastic growth as a result.

What we value

• We are open source - building a huge community around a free-for-life product is key to PostHog's strategy.

• We aim to become the most transparent company, ever. In order to enable teams to make great decisions, we share as much information as we can. In our public handbook everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, what our strategy is, and who we have raised money from. We also have regular team-wide feedback sessions, where we share honest feedback with each other.

• Working autonomously and maximizing impact - we don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what is going to have the biggest impact on our customers.

Solve big problems -we haven't built our defining feature yet. We are all about acting fast, innovating, and iterating.

We're seeking an ingestion pipeline engineer who:

• Thrives on challenges of building systems that process billions of events per day

• Gets excited about designing elegant and efficient systems that can handle terabytes of data without giving people insomnia

• Understands the importance of data integrity and reliability for customers

The ideal candidate has experience with high-throughput data processing systems such as:

• Analytics platforms

• Metric collection systems

• Log aggregation engines

• Streaming and batch-processing pipelines

We use a mixture of Node.JS and Rust for high-throughput processing. We store most of our data in Kafka, PostgreSQL, Clickhouse, S3, and Redis, but with the growing volume of data, we're constantly re-evaluating our technological choices. We're looking for someone who understands the principles of designing distributed systems and can use them to pick the best tools for the job.

At PostHog you won't get stuck maintaining an obscure microservice or working in the shadows of the product org, instead, you will:

• Own the entire service from end-to-end: No committees or overzealous PMs, the destiny of the ingestion pipeline will be in your hands.

• Build open-source software: You'll be able to show your Rust-fu to your friends and family (and security researchers too).

• Build in the hot path: Your code will decide whether our customers and engineers have a good time or not.

• Start from first principles: No cookie-cutter solutions here, you'll be safe from AI agents for a good while.

• See immediate results: Small, confident, frequent steps forward – that's how we like to move.

Our team is spread across North America and Europe and we're looking for another engineer in Europe or East Coast US.

We're growing very quickly at PostHog, so quickly that the numbers in our job descriptions often get out of date. Our ingestion pipeline is currently processing 10s of billions of events a month and we're hoping to add one more zero to that soon. You’ll be responsible for developing the infrastructure to capture all that data, process it reliably, and provide it to other parts of PostHog's platform, such as product analytics, feature flags, CDP, and more.

• Experience working with highly scalable, event-driven distributed systems

• You have developed multi-tenant software-as-a-service products

• Experience with Node.JS, Go, Rust, or similar languages

• You have worked with PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, or similar systems at scale

• You know how to ship changes quickly without breaking things

• Experience with customer data platforms or similar data analytics systems

• You've carried a pager and have dealt with incidents

• You're comfortable with provisioning and maintaining cloud infrastructure

• Experience with benchmarking and profiling tools

• Knowledge of observability systems and practices

We believe people from diverse backgrounds, with different identities and experiences, make our product and our company better. That’s why we dedicated a page in our handbook to diversity and inclusion. No matter your background, we'd love to hear from you! Alignment with our values is just as important as experience! 🙏

Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you - we're happy to accommodate!