Backend Engineer (EST timezone)

The ideal candidate has experience with high-throughput data processing systems such as

• Observability platforms & Open Telemetry instrumentation
• Metric collection systems
• Log aggregation engines
• Streaming and batch-processing pipelines

We use a mixture of Node.JS and Rust for high-throughput processing. We store most of our data in Kafka, PostgreSQL, Clickhouse, S3, and Redis, but with the growing volume of data, we're constantly re-evaluating our technological choices. We're looking for someone who understands the principles of designing distributed systems and can use them to pick the best tools for the job.

What you'll be doing

You'll help build PostHog's observability suite: Logs (live and growing fast), Traces (in alpha), and Metrics (landing soon); the products that let our customers, and their AI agents, understand, debug, and self-heal their own software.

This is the foundation for self-driving, self-healing products, and we're building most of it from scratch.

The core challenge is easy to say and hard to do: ingest, store, and retrieve enormous volumes of telemetry; fast, reliably, and cost-effectively. Getting data in is the easy half; getting it back out efficiently at petabyte scale, without melting the infra bill, is the real game. We're already handling terabytes of data and it's growing!

You won't be maintaining a corner of someone else's system. You'll own a product area end-to-end, taking it from alpha -> beta -> GA, making the architecture calls, and shipping in the hot path where your code decides whether customers have a good day. You'll work across all three products and go deep on one.

Requirements

• Experience with highly scalable, event-driven distributed systems
• Strong across the full data lifecycle at scale, ingestion and efficient, cost-aware storage & retrieval (query/storage performance matters as much as throughput)
• Experience with Node.JS, Go, Rust, or similar
• You've worked at scale with systems like Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Redis, or S3
• You can take an ambiguous, greenfield problem, frame it properly, and drive it forward without hand-holding
• You've worked with multi-tenant SaaS
• You ship changes quickly without breaking things

Nice to have

• Knowledge of observability systems & practices - OpenTelemetry, and the realities of logs/metrics/traces at scale
• Experience with high-throughput log aggregation, metric collection, or tracing systems
• You've worked on call and dealt with incidents
• Comfortable provisioning and maintaining cloud infrastructure
• Experience with benchmarking and profiling tools

If this sounds like you, we should talk.

We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process.…