Backend Engineer

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.

• PostHog 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, Workflow, 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 hiring for a range of backend roles here. What you end up working on will depend on your exact skillset and preferences, so choose your own adventure.

In general we seek Backend Engineers who are:

• Enthusiastic drivers. We need proactive people that can fully own projects and get them done, and know to get help when needed. "Are we there yet?" is the wrong question.

• Optimistic problem solvers. Things get hard here sometimes – whether it's scaling, shipping complex products, handling a stream of support requests, or trying to ship something that touches multiple teams. We need people who won't get disheartened, and will collaborate, iterate, and ship their way out of anything.

• Grown ups. We’re an international bunch of weirdos, but one thing unites us: everyone is kind, considerate, and professional towards each other. This isn't about age or experience, it's about being low-ego, flexible, and respectful.

• Genuine builders. PostHog is full of people who just love building stuff, people who would still be building software even if there wasn't a paycheck at the end. If this sounds like you, we should talk.

• Owning large-scale systems from idea to deployment. You’ll drive projects from concept to production, designing solutions that meet our internal user needs and scale effortlessly. You’ll choose the right tools, optimize for performance, and take full ownership in deploying, monitoring, and refining systems to ensure they deliver real impact. This is about building with purpose and seeing it through.

• Collaborating with Product teams. The Product Engineers are our users. The product direction of the teams relying on your services is what drives you, and you like proactively getting involved to make sure product ideas scale

• Talking to our internal users. Good Backend Engineers read feedback from their internal users and iterate quickly. Great Backend Engineers have internal users they're friendly with, talk with them frequently, bounce ideas off them, and iterate with them when they ship new things.

• Doing support. Every week, one person in each engineering team is designated as the Support hero. Their job is to investigate and resolve issues reported by users for their product. Giving internal users support, and shipping fixes and improvements in real-time, is one of the best ways to spark joy in our internal users. This role will also include some on-call time, too.

• Writing docs. We have a content team that will collaborate with you on reviewing, polishing, and improving your documentation, but the best person to document a new feature is the person who built it.

• Backend experience with relevant technologies - e.g. Rust, Python, Typescript/Node.Js

• Experience with infra/cloud technologies - eg. Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS

• Database experience: We use PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, but any OLAP experience is welcome.

• Experience with large scale distributed systems

• Experience taking a project from 0 to 1. You might have led a project, been a founder previously, or built an impressive side project.

• Strong writing skills. We document everything, most of it publicly. The ability to communicate your ideas and make persuasive arguments is essential.

• Have worked at a high-growth SaaS company before.

• Extensive knowledge of Django and/or TypeScript-based React.

• Experience building AI-native products, or integrating AI into existing software.

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