Backend Engineer

PostHog helps engineers build better products. We are a single platform to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features. We give engineers product & web analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, a CDP, SQL access, and a data warehouse… and there’s plenty more to come.

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 70,000 companies have installed the platform. We've had huge success with our paid upgrades, raised $27m from some of the world's top investors, and have shown strong product-led growth - 97% driven by word of mouth. 

We're growing quickly but sustainably - we're default alive, averaging 10% monthly revenue growth, with >$10m ARR. We're staying focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring a handful of exceptional team members, and seeing fantastic growth as a result.

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 might call yourself a node engineer, a backend engineer or a distributed systems engineer. You’re a senior engineer, and you love both going deep optimizing service and thinking about what the product should do (and working directly with customers to figure it out)

We’re growing very quickly at PostHog, and the amount of data we’re ingesting is growing even faster. You’ll be responsible for capturing data, processing it reliably at very high scale, and building a workflow/delivery engine. We process 10s of billions of events a month.

We use a mixture of typescript/node and rust for high-throughput processing. We’re in the middle of building a high-volume workflow and processing engine that gives our customers a lot of flexibility in how to send data. One day, you’ll be making high-level architecture decisions, the next you’ll be optimizing a niche part of our pipeline that massively increases throughput 2x, the day after you’ll work directly with customers to build something to help them send data to a 3rd party.

• You have experience with either typescript/node or rust, and are happy to work in both

• You have experience building a system that has to deal with high volumes of requests/data

• You can choose a sensible architecture quickly, and then ship it faster than other people think is possible

Nice to have

• You’ve carried a pager and have dealt with incidents

We believe people from diverse backgrounds, with different identities and experiences, make our product and our company better. That’s why we dedicated a page in our handbook to diversity and inclusion. No matter your background, we'd love to hear from you! Alignment with our values is just as important as experience! 🙏

Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you - we're happy to accommodate!