Team Pipeline

Tech Lead

  • Department

    Engineering

  • Location

    Remote (EMEA)

  • Timezone(s)

    GMT -5:00 to GMT +2:00

About PostHog

PostHog helps engineers build better products. We are a single platform to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features. We give engineers product analytics, session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, event pipelines, 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 35,000 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. 

Despite the 📉 tech market, we're default alive and doing better than ever!

PostHog makes money from our cloud product, or people can self host the open source project. We average 10% monthly revenue growth and are aiming for $10m ARR in early 2024. 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 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.

  • 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.

  • Solving big problems - we haven't built our defining feature yet. We are all about shipping fast, talking to users, and iterating.

What you’ll be doing

You’ll have the opportunity to work on huge data challenges (we peak at 1m events/minute and process billions of events) while leading a team of seasoned and smart engineers. You will have incredibly high autonomy and work closely with our customers, who are also engineers. More specifically:

  • You'll work closely with the team to plan long-term goals on how to scale the ingestion and export pipeline.

  • We've had such a large increase in event scale, we need to re-design how we do ingestion to future proof for the next couple of years, when we'll repeat this (else we'd be over-engineering by definition).

  • Maintain a high bar for the team’s quality of work and performance (i.e. incident reviews, stand-ups, etc.) 

  • Ship a bunch of code! 

Requirements

  • Strong product knowledge with some infrastructure and/or data experience

  • High ownership, ability to drive big complex products to completion

  • Some leadership experience (this is still mostly a shipping role)

  • Proven ability to lead big projects to completion

Nice to have

  • Node/typescript experience

  • Comfortable running incidents

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! 🙏

Salary

We have a set system for compensation as part of being transparent. Salary varies based on location and level of experience.

Learn more about compensation

Location (based on market rates)

The benchmark for each role we are hiring for is based on the market rate in San Francisco.

Level

We pay more experienced team members a greater amount since it is reasonable to expect this correlates with an increase in skill

Step

We hire into the Established step by default and believe there's a place to have incremental steps to allow for more flexibility.

Salary calculator

  1. Benchmark (San Francisco) $236,000
  2. Location factor 1
  3. Level modifier 1
  4. Step modifier 0.95 - 1.04
Base salary$224,200 - $245,440plus equity

Benefits

  • Generous, transparent compensation & equityGenerous, transparent compensation & equity
  • Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)
  • Two meeting-free days per weekTwo meeting-free days per week
  • Home officeHome office
  • Coworking creditCoworking credit
  • Private health, dental, and vision insurance.Private health, dental, and vision insurance.
  • Training budgetTraining budget
  • Access to our Hedge HouseAccess to our Hedge House
  • Carbon offsettingCarbon offsetting
  • Pension & 401k contributionsPension & 401k contributions
  • We hire and pay locallyWe hire and pay locally
  • Company offsitesCompany offsites

Get more details about all our benefits on the Careers page.

Your team's mission and objectives

Provide the best events pipeline in the world.

Objectives: Q3 2023

  • Define and enforce limits on what users can send us - Owner @xaviervelo
  • Deprecate and improve apps
    • Finish batch exports so we can deprecate export apps - Owner @tomasfarias
    • Remove all processing apps - Owner @tiina303
  • Figure out the pipeline architecture for the next 2 years - Owner @timgl

Objectives: Q2 2023

  • Objective: CDP - Owner @fuziontech
    • Key Result: Rock solid webhooks - Owner @hazzadous
      • Edit: deprioritized as it is not a burning bridge, and instead:
      • Improve quality of existing offering by removing questionable Apps: mark apps that store lots of data in postgres, or are generally lower quality as non-global or disable altogether.
      • Separate export and CPD Apps within the interface to enable separating the two products. Bill these two products separately.
      • Make batch processing exports rock solid as below.
    • Key Result: Rock solid batch processing (exports) - Owner @tomasfarias
  • Objective: Pipeline unblocks query performance and ensures data quality - Owner @tiina303
    • Key Result: Persons on Events write path and squash shipped with monitoring and alerting
    • Key Result: Backfills are complete for all teams
    • Key Result: Guaranteed deduplication of UUIDs in events table within 7 days (with docs explaining it)
    • Key Result: Query time deduplication of events to cover until ClickHouse deduplication is complete
  • Objective: Pipeline Robustness and Reliability - Owner @xvello
    • Key Result: Errors cause kafka lag instead of DLQ production e.g. person creation failures cause kafka lag not go to DLQ
    • Key Result: Plugin server scales elastically and deploys do not create more than 2 minutes of lag

Objectives: Q1 2023

  • Objective: Performance
    • Key Results: We have wrapped up the person-on-event project and have deprecated the old non-person-on-events queries
      • Why? Performance speed up
    • Key Results: We have reduced the cost per event for capture by an order of magnitude
      • Why? Infra savings and improves performance
  • Objective: Reliability
    • Key Results: We have converted all current US dashboards into IaC dashboards configured in Terraform and made all necessary migrations from StatsD to Prom to support this.
      • Why? Gets US and EU equivalent in terms of monitoring
    • Key Results: All of our alerts have runbooks
      • Why? Improve incident recovery times and share knowledge with all engineers, so that most incidents can be resolved without escalating to the team
    • Key Results: Backfills do not slow us down or take down the system. We have tests for this.
      • Why? Improves service quality and protects against bad actors
    • Key Results: Erroring apps fail gracefully, do not take down anything else, and we have tests to prove this. And re-enable after temporary unavailability
      • Why? Improves service quality and tackles customer annoyance of apps turning off when there's an error

Interview process

We do 2-3 short interviews, then pay you to do some real-life (or close to real-life) work.

  • 1
    Application(You are here)

    Our talent team will review your application to see how your skills and experience align with our needs.

  • 2
    Culture interview30-min video call

    Our goal is to explore your motivations to join our team, learn why you’d be a great fit, and answer questions about us.

  • 3
    Technical interview45 minutes, varies by role

    You'll meet the hiring team who will evaluate skills needed to be successful in your role. No live coding.

  • 4
    PostHog SuperDayPaid day of work

    You’ll join a standup, meet the team, and work on a task related to your role, offering a realistic view of what it’s like working at PostHog.

  • 5
    OfferPop the champagne (after you sign)

    If everyone’s happy, we’ll make you an offer to join us - YAY!

Apply

(Now for the fun part...)

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