Backend Engineer

Help us to increase the number of successful products in the world!

• 🌍 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.

About PostHog

We’re equipping every developer to build successful products by giving them a suite of products to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features. We currently offer product and web analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, a CDP, SQL access, a data warehouse, and LLM observability… and there’s plenty more to come.

PostHog was created as an open-source project during Y Combinator's W20 cohort. We had the most successful B2B software launch on HackerNews since 2012 with a product that was just 4 weeks old. Since then, more than 100,000 companies have installed the platform. We've had huge success with our paid upgrades, raised bags of money from some of the world's top investors, and have extremely strong product-led growth – 97% driven by word of mouth. 

We're growing quickly, but sustainably. We're also default alive, averaging 10% monthly revenue growth and with more than $20m 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.

Job Summary

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.

What you'll be doing

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

Requirements

• 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.

Nice to have

• 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!

#LI-DNI

Benefits

What we offer in return:

• 💰 Generous, transparent compensation and employee-friendly equity in PostHog

• 🌴 Permissionless holiday with a 25-day minimum requirement - the team used 31 days on average in 2022

• ☕ $300/month towards co-working (or a WeWork membership) and $1,500/quarter for meetups

• 👵 👴 Pension/401k contributions (4% matching)

• 🍼 12 weeks' parental leave after your first year at full pay

• 📕 Training budget and free books

• 🧠 Spill mental health chat

• 🤝 $100/month budget to provide support to open-source projects

• 💸 We'll be your first investor and biggest cheerleader, if you spend two years at PostHog and leave to start a new company

• Generous severance - 4 months from PostHog after you’ve been with us for 3 months (but you only need to provide 1 month's notice)

• 🛫 Regular team off-sites with carbon offsetting for work travel with Project Wren

  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!