Senior Data Engineer

About PostHog

PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform. We provide product-led teams with everything they need to understand user behaviour, including funnels, session recording, user paths, multivariate testing, feature flags, heat maps, and more. PostHog can be deployed to the cloud, or self-hosted on existing infrastructure, removing the need to send data externally.

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, we are default alive, and we didn't raised a huge / now-overpriced round in 2021. While others are focused on layoffs and struggling to grow into huge valuations, we're focssing on an awesome product for end users, hiring (a handful of) exceptional team members and seeing fantastic increases in revenue as a result.

We’re now looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join our Ingestion team. We hire globally, but are currently restricted to GMT -5 to +2 time zones for this particular role.

What you’ll be doing

We are looking for someone to take our ingestion pipeline to the next level. You will be working with our super talented ingestion small team to iteratively build out and shore up the functionality of our ingestion pipeline. You'll be focused on the core of our data ingestion pipeline - our App service. It is responsible for transforming, augmenting, routing, and backfilling data to many different final destinations, including ClickHouse, the warehouse that we use to power PostHog.

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

• Overview of our ingestion pipeline

• Reworking our events schema in order to reduce joins at querytime

• Performing migrations on TBs of data (in someone else's datacenter) with zero downtime!

• You can read more about that last one (Async Migrations) here

What we value

We are open source - building a huge community around a free-for-life product is key to our 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 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.

We’re an all-remote company and writing things down is hugely important to us. We use asynchronous communication to reduce time spent in meetings. We are structured for speed and autonomy - we are all about acting fast, innovating and iterating.

We are a global remote working company, which allows us to hire amazing people from all over the world, and foster an inclusive culture.

Requirements:

• Demonstrable experience designing and/or operating large scale realtime or near-realtime data pipelines

• Operational knowledge and experience with Kafka at scale

• Experience working with relational databases

• You can write Python and/or JavaScript (TypeScript is a plus)

• Knowledge of distributed systems and event streaming

• Nice to haves (if you don't have any of these you should still apply!)

• Experience deploying realtime or near-realtime data pipelines to K8s environments

• Knowledge of stateful streaming computation engines like Apache Flink and/or Samza

• Experience operating or being a user of ClickHouse or any other data warehouse

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!

What we offer in return:

• 💰 Generous, transparent compensation and employee-friendly equity in PostHog
• 🌴 Unlimited time off with a 25 day minimum (in 2021 the team on average took 32 days off)
• 🏥 Private medical insurance, including dental and vision (US and UK only)
• 👵 👴 Pension/401k contributions (4% matching)
• 🍼 Generous parental, bereavement and child loss leave
• 📕 Training budget and free books
• ☕ $200/month budget towards co-working or café working and $250/month for team socials
• 🧠 Spill mental health chat
• 🤝 $100/month budget to provide support to open-source projects
• 💸 We'll be your first investor
• 🛫 Regular team off-sites (we were in Iceland in March) with carbon offsetting for work travel with Project Wren