Backend Engineer — Ingestion

Requirements and responsibilities

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About PostHog

A built-in data warehouse, so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights.
A customer data platform, so they can send their data wherever they need with ease.
PostHog AI, an AI-powered analyst that answers product questions, helps users find useful session recordings, and writes custom SQL queries.

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. 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 and make product decisions. Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed.
Shipping fast: 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 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, 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 with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it's fun.

Who we’re looking for

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

Who we’re looking for

Analytics platforms
Metric collection systems
Log aggregation engines
Streaming and batch-processing pipelines

What makes this role unique

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.