Backend Engineer (EST timezone)

ABOUT POSTHOG Product development used to mean manually writing code, running analysis, diagnosing bugs, and rolling out changes using dozens of tools. PostHog is the only platform that acts like a co-pilot for you (and your AI agents) to do it all – autonomously. We started with open-source product analytics, launched out of Y Combinator's W20 cohort https://posthog.com/handbook/story. We've since shipped more than a dozen products https://posthog.com/products, including: - PostHog Code https://posthog.com/code, the only AI devtool that understands your product, not just your codebase. - A built-in data warehouse https://posthog.com/docs/data-warehouse, so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights. - PostHog AI https://posthog.com/ai, an AI-powered analyst that answers product questions, helps users find useful session recordings, and writes custom SQL queries. We are: 1. Product-led. More than 450,000 organizations have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit. 2. Default alive https://paulgraham.com/aord.html. Revenue is growing incredibly quickly, and we're very efficient. We raise money to push ambition and grow faster, not to keep the lights on. 3. Well-funded. We've raised more than $180m from some of the world's top investors. We're set up for a long, ambitious journey. We're focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring exceptional teammates, shipping fast, and being as weird as possible https://posthog.com/deskhog. THINGS WE CARE ABOUT - 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 https://posthog.com/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 https://posthog.com/handbook/wide-company and make product decisions https://posthog.com/handbook/which-products. Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed. - Shipping fast: Why not now? https://posthog.com/handbook/values#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 https://posthog.com/founders/cracked-manifesto 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 https://posthog.com/handbook/company/culture#were-on-the-makers-schedule, 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 https://posthog.com/deskhog with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it's fun. WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR We're seeking a backend engineer engineer for our APM team who thrives on challenges of building systems that process Petabytes of data. Someone who gets excited about designing elegant and efficient systems that can handle this amount of data without giving people insomnia. A strong engineer that understands the importance of data integrity and reliability for customers The ideal candidate has experience with high-throughput data processing systems such as: - Observability platforms & Open Telemetry instrumentation - 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. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING 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. 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 NICE TO HAVE - Knowledge of observability systems & practices - OpenTelemetry, and the realities of logs/metrics/traces at scale - Experience with high-throughput log aggregation, metric collection, or tracing systems - You've worked on call and dealt with incidents - Comfortable provisioning and maintaining cloud infrastructure - Experience with benchmarking and profiling tools If this sounds like you, we should talk. We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know. #LI-DNI