Senior Backend Engineer

PostHog helps engineers build better products. We are a single platform to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features. We give engineers product analytics, session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, event pipelines, SQL access and a data warehouse… and there’s plenty more to come.

PostHog was created as an open source project during Y Combinator's W20 cohort and had the most successful B2B software launch on HackerNews since 2012 - with a product that was just 4 weeks old. Since then, more than 35,000 companies have installed the platform. We've had huge success with our paid upgrades, raised $27m from some of the world's top investors, and have shown strong product-led growth - 97% driven by word of mouth. 

Despite the 📉 tech market, we're default alive and doing better than ever!

PostHog makes money from our cloud product, or people can self host the open source project. We average 10% monthly revenue growth and are aiming for $10m ARR in early 2024. While others are focused on layoffs and struggling to grow into huge valuations, we're focusing on an awesome product for end users, hiring a handful of exceptional team members and seeing fantastic increases in revenue as a result.

What you’ll be doing

We are looking for someone to take our analytics capabilities to the next level. You will be working with our Product Analytics small team to iteratively build the next generation of our analytics backbone. 

You’ll be mainly working with ClickHouse and Python, making sure all our queries are “Web Scale”, and that our users are happy. You will help us build HogQL, our own wrapper around ClickHouse SQL. More generally, you’ll proactively work to make our analytics best in class.

If you want to see for yourself exactly the kinds of projects you would be working on, check out:

• Speed up property searches by 150x

• Speed up trends queries by reducing data streamed between shards

• Adding a custom AST parser to support formulas in events tables

• Adding HogQL filters into existing insights

• Show person properties timeline

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.

• 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.

• Solving big problems - we haven't built our defining feature yet. We are all about shipping fast, talking to users, and iterating.

• You have experience building high-performance data systems.

• You move fast, have a strong bias for impact and don’t shy away from stepping on toes.

Nice to have

• You've worked in a high-growth SaaS company and/or analytics product. 

If this sounds like what you’d love to be doing, we can’t wait to hear from you. If you’re not sure that you exactly fit the above criteria, get in touch anyway. Alignment with our values is just as important as experience! 🙏