Responsibilities
- Build and evolve core query engine infrastructure
- Work across Nova's query execution engine and distributed compute layer: query planning, columnar storage formats, encoding and compression, caching, and cluster-level resource management.
- Design and implement new capabilities as Nova expands to support more warehouse-imported data types, such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
- Design for high-throughput automated query workloads — as AI agents become a primary source of queries, ensure Nova’s architecture supports sustained, concurrent, and programmatic query patterns at scale.
- Drive cost and performance at scale
- Own and execute projects that materially reduce infrastructure cost — compute, storage, network, and memory — while maintaining or improving latency and throughput.
- Profile and optimize JVM performance: GC tuning, memory management, concurrency, and data layout decisions that compound at our scale.
- Build guardrails and observability to catch expensive or pathological queries before they impact the system.
- Improve reliability and operational excellence
- Strengthen Nova’s reliability posture: identify systemic failure modes, drive durable fixes, and raise the bar on how we detect and respond to production issues.
- Participate in on-call rotation to root-cause incidents and turn one-off fixes into architectural improvements.
- Contribute to capacity planning, safe rollout practices, and the operational tooling that keeps Nova healthy.
- Influence through technical leadership
- Lead the design and execution of multi-month projects that improve Nova’s architecture, performance, or capabilities.
- Contribute to technical direction through design docs, architecture discussions, and code reviews — helping the team make principled tradeoffs.
- Mentor senior engineers on distributed systems thinking, production debugging, and system design.
- Collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams to ensure Nova’s capabilities translate into customer value.
Requirements
- 7+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems.
- Hands-on experience building or extending analytical/OLAP systems — query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, or equivalent.
- Track record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale (compute, storage, network).
- Strong computer science fundamentals: distributed systems (partitioning, replication, consistency, failover), data structures and algorithms, concurrency and multi-threading, performance optimization.
- Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure — AWS (S3, DynamoDB, EC2), Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform — or strong equivalents.
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python.
- Demonstrated technical influence beyond your immediate team: leading design discussions, driving cross-team alignment, mentoring engineers.
Nice to Have
- Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
- Deep JVM expertise — GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization at production scale.
- Experience with columnar data formats and encodings (Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats).
- Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems.
- Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects or published work in the data systems space.
Benefits
- Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision insurance coverages, with 100% employer-paid premiums for employee Medical, Dental, Vision on select plans
- Flexible time off, paid holidays, and more
- Generous stipends to spend on what matters most to you, whether that’s wellness (monthly), commuter transit/parking (monthly), learning and development (quarterly), home office equipment (annual), and much more
- Excellent Parental benefits including: 12-20 weeks of Paid Parental Leave, Carrot Fertility Benefits/Adoption/Surrogacy support, Back-up Child Care support
- Mental health and wellness benefits including no cost employee access to Modern Health coaching & therapy Sessions and high quality physician office experience via One Medical membership (select U.S. locations only)
- Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
- Charitable giving grant and paid volunteer time off
- Mentorship programs, management training, and wellness initiatives
Work Arrangement
Remote (Worldwide) — San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo
Additional Information
- On-call rotation
- Equal employment opportunities (EEO)
