Backend Engineer - Ingestion (Europe/UK timezone)

Job description

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 Europe/UK based 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. WHAT MAKES THIS ROLE UNIQUE 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. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING Our team is spread across North America and Europe and we're looking for another engineer in Europe or the UK. 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. REQUIREMENTS - 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 Kafka and PostgreSQL, Redis, or similar systems at scale - You know how to ship changes quickly without breaking things NICE TO HAVE - 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 are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know #LI-DNI