Senior Backend Engineer - Product Analytics

  • Department

    Engineering

  • Location

    Remote (EMEA)

  • Timezone(s)

    GMT +0 to GMT +2

About PostHog

PostHog is the open source Product OS - it's a suite of product and data tools, built on the modern data stack. We provide product analytics, session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, event pipelines and a data warehouse. PostHog can be deployed to the cloud, or self-hosted on existing infrastructure, removing the need to send user data to a 3rd party.

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 10,000 companies have installed the platform, we've had huge success with our paid upgrades, and we have 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!

We've been averaging >20% monthly revenue growth and we didn't raise a huge / now-overpriced round in 2021. 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 super talented 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:

About our engineering teams

  • Engineers work across one of our small teams. Our main product-focused engineering teams are Product Analytics, Session Recording, and Experimentation. We usually hire for all three teams, and then decide where individual people will work the best. We also give people the opportunity to move across teams, to make sure they get to work on different problems and learn new skills.

  • We work on a two week sprint basis and we give everyone in the team the opportunity to suggest what they want to build, in order to have the biggest impact on our customers. Engineers are given real ownership of what they want to focus on, and they are responsible for tests, user feedback, and tracking.

  • You will be working directly with our customers - we have a weekly support hero, who is in charge of all customer questions and inquiries that week. We also have a thriving user Slack group and we receive PRs from users every week.

  • The technical challenge is designing a highly scalable product right out of the box when deployed on premise, supporting a wide breadth of features that give users superpowers, and enabling an ecosystem of contributors and apps from anyone in the world.


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. We also have regular team-wide feedback sessions, where we share honest feedback with each other.

  • 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.

  • Solve big problems - we haven't built our defining feature yet. We are all about acting fast, innovating, and iterating.

Requirements

  • 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! 🙏

Salary

We have a set system for compensation as part of being transparent. Salary varies based on location and level of experience.

Learn more about compensation

Location (based on market rates)

The benchmark for each role we are hiring for is based on the market rate in San Francisco.

Level

We pay more experienced team members a greater amount since it is reasonable to expect this correlates with an increase in skill

Step

We hire into the Established step by default and believe there's a place to have incremental steps to allow for more flexibility.

Base salary

$224,200 - $245,440 plus equity

Benefits

  • Generous, transparent compensation & equityGenerous, transparent compensation & equity
  • Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)
  • Two meeting-free days per weekTwo meeting-free days per week
  • Home officeHome office
  • Coworking creditCoworking credit
  • Private health, dental, and vision insurance.Private health, dental, and vision insurance.
  • Training budgetTraining budget
  • Access to our Hedge HouseAccess to our Hedge House
  • Carbon offsettingCarbon offsetting
  • Pension & 401k contributionsPension & 401k contributions
  • We hire and pay locallyWe hire and pay locally
  • Company offsitesCompany offsites

Get more details about all our benefits on the Careers page.

Your team's mission and objectives

Makers everywhere get better at building products because of PostHog

Q2 2023 Goals

Objective 1: PostHog 3000 Hacker News launch is a wild success

  • Why? Subjectively, we believe there are many UI/UX improvements to make it a tool that product engineers love.
  • Key results:
    • We have shipped a reimagined IDE-inspired interface

Objective 2: Make PostHog performance frustration free for our 10 largest customers

  • Key results:
    • For top 10 US&EU clients p95 of dashboard load time <10s
    • For top 10 US&EU clients p95 of insight load time <10s
    • US ClickHouse setup is less bespoke

Objective 3: HogQL

  • Why? We have built our query language called HogQL. The experience using it is still lacking.
  • Key results:
    • HogQL is launched and used by 10% of users
    • HogQL parsing errors are insightful and timely.
    • HogQL supports all of ClickHouse SQL, including arrays and window functions.
    • You can do pivot tables via HogQL, or in the interface we built to make this easier.
    • The trends and funnels insights are powered by HogQL.

Interview process

We do 2-3 short interviews, then pay you to do some real-life (or close to real-life) work.

  • 1
    Application(You are here)

    Our talent team will review your application to see how your skills and experience align with our needs.

  • 2
    Culture interview30-min video call

    Our goal is to explore your motivations to join our team, learn why you’d be a great fit, and answer questions about us.

  • 3
    Technical interview45 minutes, varies by role

    You'll meet the hiring team who will evaluate skills needed to be successful in your role. No live coding.

  • 4
    PostHog SuperDayPaid day of work

    You’ll join a standup, meet the team, and work on a task related to your role, offering a realistic view of what it’s like working at PostHog.

  • 5
    OfferPop the champagne (after you sign)

    If everyone’s happy, we’ll make you an offer to join us - YAY!

Apply

(Now for the fun part...)

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