Senior Backend Engineer - Product Analytics

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:

• 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

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.

• 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! 🙏