Backend Engineer (Europe/UK timezone)

Department: Engineering

Location: Remote (EMEA), Remote (UK)

Employment Type: FullTime

About PostHog

Product development used to mean manually writing code, running analysis, diagnosing bugs, and rolling out changes using dozens of tools.

PostHog is the only platform that acts like a co-pilot for you (and your AI agents) to do it all – autonomously.

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

• PostHog Code, the only AI devtool that understands your product, not just your codebase.

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

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

We are:

1. Product-led. More than 450,000 organizations have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.

2. Default alive. Revenue is growing incredibly quickly, and were very efficient. We raise money to push ambition and grow faster, not to keep the lights on.

3. Well-funded. Weve raised more than $180m from some of the worlds top investors. Were set up for a long, ambitious journey.

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

Things we care about

• 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 whats 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 cant do that shipping at a normal pace. Weve 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. Were 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 youve 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. Were optimistic about whats 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 its fun.

Who we’re looking for

Were seeking a Europe/UK based ingestion pipeline engineer who:

• Thrives on challenges of building systems that process billions of events per day

• Gets excited about designing elegant and efficient systems that can handle terabytes of data without giving people insomnia

• Understands the importance of data integrity and reliability for customers

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

• Analytics platforms

• 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, were constantly re-evaluating our technological choices. Were looking for someone who understands the principles of designing distributed systems and can use them to pick the best tools for the job.

What makes this role unique

At PostHog you wont get stuck maintaining an obscure microservice or working in the shadows of the product org, instead, you will:

• Own the entire service from end-to-end: No committees or overzealous PMs, the destiny of the ingestion pipeline will be in your hands.

• Build open-source software: Youll be able to show your Rust-fu to your friends and family (and security researchers too).

• Build in the hot path: Your code will decide whether our customers and engineers have a good time or not.

• Start from first principles: No cookie-cutter solutions here, youll be safe from AI agents for a good while.

• See immediate results: Small, confident, frequent steps forward – thats how we like to move.

What you’ll be doing

Our team is spread across North America and Europe and were looking for another engineer in Europe or the UK.

Were growing very quickly at PostHog, so quickly that the numbers in our job descriptions often get out of date. Our ingestion pipeline is currently processing 10s of billions of events a month and were hoping to add one more zero to that soon. You’ll be responsible for developing the infrastructure to capture all that data, process it reliably, and provide it to other parts of PostHogs platform, such as product analytics, feature flags, CDP, and more.

Requirements

• Experience working with highly scalable, event-driven distributed systems

• You have developed multi-tenant software-as-a-service products

• Experience with Node.JS, Go, Rust, or similar languages

• You have worked with Kafka and PostgreSQL, Redis, or similar systems at scale

• You know how to ship changes quickly without breaking things

Nice to have

• Experience with customer data platforms or similar data analytics systems

• Youve carried a pager and have dealt with incidents

• Youre comfortable with provisioning and maintaining cloud infrastructure

• Experience with benchmarking and profiling tools

• Knowledge of observability systems and practices

We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know

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