Staff Software Engineer

Join our team as a Staff Software Engineer, where you'll work on the full stack of a modern OLAP system, driving improvements in performance, cost-efficiency, and reliability. You'll influence technical direction, mentor other engineers, and collaborate with various teams to ensure our capabilities translate into customer value. Enjoy a generous benefits package, including flexible vacation time, wellness stipends, and equity options.

• Contribuer à l'architecture, à la performance et aux capacités de Nova, en travaillant sur l'exécution des requêtes et la couche de calcul distribué.
• Diriger la conception et l'exécution de projets multi-mois qui améliorent l'architecture, la performance ou les capacités de Nova.
• Mentorer les ingénieurs seniors sur la pensée des systèmes distribués, le débogage en production et la conception des systèmes.
• This role is ideal for someone who finds real satisfaction in making a complex distributed system faster, cheaper, and more reliable — and who wants to do that work on a system that directly powers the product experience for thousands of customers
• Thinks about cost, performance, and reliability as interconnected concerns, not separate workstreams
• Finds it natural to help other engineers level up — through pairing, design reviews, or just being the person who explains the “why” behind a system’s design
• Gets energy from working deep inside a complex distributed system — understanding how data flows through it, where the bottlenecks are, and how to make it meaningfully better
• Communicates clearly about technical tradeoffs and earns influence through the quality of your work and ideas, not through title
• Has built or significantly extended an OLAP engine, columnar database, query processor, or large-scale data processing system — not just operated one
• Hands-on experience building or extending analytical/OLAP systems — query engines, columnar storage, large-scale data processing frameworks, or equivalent
• 7+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering, with depth in distributed data systems
• Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure — AWS (S3, DynamoDB, EC2), Kafka, Redis/ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform — or strong equivalents
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python
• Strong computer science fundamentals: distributed systems (partitioning, replication, consistency, failover), data structures and algorithms, concurrency and multi-threading, performance optimization
• Track record of driving significant cost optimization on cloud infrastructure at scale (compute, storage, network)
• Demonstrated technical influence beyond your immediate team: leading design discussions, driving cross-team alignment, mentoring engineers
• Experience with specific OLAP or query engine systems: Druid, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar
• Deep JVM expertise — GC tuning, profiling, memory optimization at production scale
• Experience with columnar data formats and encodings (Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom formats)
• Familiarity with product analytics, experimentation platforms, or event-driven data systems
• Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects or published work in the data systems space