Backend Engineer

• 🌍 Location: We are full-remote and globally distributed! Our current team is distributed between GMT-8 and GMT+2 so we currently only hire in these timezones.

• 🎤 Interview process: 1) 20min call with one of our Talent Partners, 2) 60min with Zach or Pawel (technical interview), and 3) 15min call with CEO James, 4) PostHog SuperDay (paid day of work). Read more about our interview process.

• 🖥️ Team: All engineering teams are hiring.

• 💼 Manager: Pawel Cebula

• 💰 Compensation: Please check our compensation calculator.

• 🦔 Read more about how we hire and how we think about diversity & inclusion.

We're shipping every product that companies need to run their business from their first day, to the day they IPO, and beyond. The operating system for folks who build software.

We started with open-source product analytics, launched out of Y Combinator's W20 cohort. We've since shipped more than a dozen products, including:

• A built-in data warehouse, so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights.

• A customer data platform, so they can send their data wherever they need with ease.

• Max AI, an AI-powered analyst that answers product questions, helps users find useful session recordings, and writes custom SQL queries.

Next on the roadmap are CRM, messaging, revenue analytics, and support products. When we say every product that companies need to run their business, we really mean it!

We are:

1. Product-led. More than 100,000 companies have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.

2. Default alive. Revenue is growing 10% MoM on average, and we're very efficient. We raise money to push ambition and grow faster, not to keep the lights on.

3. Well-funded. We've raised more than $100m from some of the world's top investors. We're set up for a long, ambitious journey.

We're focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring exceptional teammates, shipping fast, and being as weird as possible.

• Transparency: Everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, our strategy, and how we work, in our public company handbook. Internally, we share revenue, notes and slides from board meetings, and fundraising plans, so everyone has the context they need to make good decisions.

• Autonomy: We don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what's going to have the biggest impact on our customers, and what they find interesting and motivating to work on. Engineers lead product teams and make product decisions. Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed.

• Shipping fast: Why not now? We want to build a lot of products; we can't do that shipping at a normal pace. We've built the company around small teams – autonomous, highly-efficient groups of cracked engineers who can outship much larger companies because they own their products end-to-end.

• Time for building: Nothing gets shipped in a meeting. We're a natively remote company. We default to async communication – PRs > Issues > Slack. Tuesdays and Thursdays are meeting-free days, and we prioritize heads down building time over perfect coordination. This will be the most productive job you've ever had.

• Ambition: We want to solve big problems. We strongly believe that aiming for the best possible upside, and sometimes missing, is better than never trying. We're optimistic about what's possible and our ability to get there.

• Being weird: Weird means redesigning an already world-class website for the 5th time. It means shipping literally every product that relates to customer data. It means building an objectively unnecessary developer toy with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it's fun.

We're looking for a backend engineer to help scale our billing system. You'll be part of the Billing team, which at its core is responsible for the infrastructure that allows our products to make money. You'll focus on the complex backend systems and data pipelines that keep our billing running smoothly.

Though almost everything at PostHog is built in public, this isn't as true for billing work as it often involves sensitive IP. Nonetheless here are some example things you’ll be working on:

• Scaling our billing system backend to handle $100m+ of revenue and beyond.

• Optimizing complex batch processing jobs and workflow orchestration for usage reporting and quota limiting.

• Building and maintaining data transformation pipelines that turn raw invoice data into internal reports, investor reports, and GAAP compliant financials.

• Driving architectural decisions for scaling our billing infrastructure.

• Improving data accuracy and performance across our billing systems.

• Supporting the implementation of new billing schemes for products we are launching.

• You have extensive backend engineering experience.

• You are very familiar with Python and SQL.

• You have experience with workflow orchestration and task processing tools.

• You enjoy thinking through and around edge cases galore.

• You love making simplicity out of complexity (and you don't mind refactoring to clean things up).

• You enjoy working on performance optimizations and scaling challenges.

• You have started a project from scratch. You might have led a project, been a founder previously, or built an impressive side project.

• You have experience in building and scaling billing systems.

• You're familiar with the modern data stack.

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!

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