Full Stack Engineer - Product Analytics
Department
Engineering
Location
Remote
Timezone(s)
UTC +2 to UTC -8
About PostHog
PostHog is the open source Product OS - it's a suite of product and data tools, built on the modern data stack. We provide product analytics, session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, event pipelines and a data warehouse. PostHog can be deployed to the cloud, or self-hosted on existing infrastructure, removing the need to send user data to a 3rd party.
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 10,000 companies have installed the platform, we've had huge success with our paid upgrades, and we have 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!
We've been averaging >20% monthly revenue growth and we didn't raise a huge / now-overpriced round in 2021. 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.
About our engineering teams
Engineers work across one of our small teams. Our main product-focused engineering teams are Product Analytics, Session Recording, and Experimentation. We usually hire for all three teams, and then decide where individual people will work the best. We also give people the opportunity to move across teams, to make sure they get to work on different problems and learn new skills.
We work on a two week sprint basis and we give everyone in the team the opportunity to suggest what they want to build, in order to have the biggest impact on our customers. Engineers are given real ownership of what they want to focus on, and they are responsible for tests, user feedback, and tracking.
You will be working directly with our customers - we have a weekly support hero, who is in charge of all customer questions and inquiries that week. We also have a thriving user Slack group and we receive PRs from users every week.
The technical challenge is designing a highly scalable product right out of the box when deployed on premise, supporting a wide breadth of features that give users superpowers, and enabling an ecosystem of contributors and apps from anyone in the world.
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.
Requirements
Experience in at least one of these areas:
UI expert— can lead development of a design system
Data systems
General frontend expert - including testing strategies and architectural sustainability
You'll have experience with relevant technologies (Python or similar, React or similar, something to do with big data is a bonus)
You have started a project from scratch. You might have led a project, been a founder previously, or built an impressive side project.
You have strong communication skills. We document everything, most of it publicly.
You move fast, have a strong bias for impact and you don’t shy away from stepping on toes.
Nice to have
You've worked in a high-growth SaaS company
Extensive experience with Django and/or TypeScript-based React
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.
Location
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.
Base salary
Benefits
Generous, transparent compensation & equity
Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)
Two meeting-free days per week
Home office
Coworking Credit
Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance
Training budget
Access to our Hedge House
Carbon offsetting
401k/pension contributions
Spill mental health chat
Company offsites
Get more details about all our benefits on the Careers page.
Your team's mission and objectives
Makers everywhere get better at building products because of PostHog
Objective 1: Nail Data Exploration
- Build v0.1 of the data exploration system
- Run a design sprint with Cory
- Ship v2
Why?
Product reason:
- We have a pretty good interface for data visualization (trends, funnels, retention, etc), but not so much for data exploration (events, persons). Users have been asking for more.
- The biggest pain comes from not being able to move between different types of related data. Imagine this scenario (© @rcmarron)
0) Found an anomaly about feature usage in trends 1) "I wonder which paying organizations have used feature Y" 2) Search for that event/action and change the tab to organizations 3) "Interesting CompanyXYZ is using it, I wonder who" 4) Flip to persons + add an organization filter for CompanyXYZ 5) See the persons 6) "I wonder how/why they're using it" 7) Click recordings + see the recordings It would be pretty clunky/impossible to explore your data in that way with today's interface.
- Currently you need to re-create this same filtered query on 3-4 different pages and manually copy over the properties. It's doable, but not a great experience.
Code reason:
- We have a lot of bespoke bridges to show related data in the interface (people on insights, recordings on people).
- Every new one adds more complexity.
- This compounded by ever so slightly different use of filters on different data types.
- The further we continue down this path, the harder it'll be to have a fully integrated product across all data.
Meta reason:
- We now have separate product teams.
- If we're not careful, we'll end up with inoperable products.
- This builds the first shared bridge between all of them.
Potential ideas for how?
- Universal Search: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/7963 (Note: this doesn't mean natural language text search)
- An "explore" interface/table, which supports input from various swappable data sources, with a unified set of filters applied to data.
- Support for custom columns and formulas on those tables.
- Ability to save as a cohorts, save as an action, or export as a CSV when the data permits.
- The ability to link to these tables from anywhere. "Explore further" links wherever we show any data in the interface.
Future steps.
- Replace all other data tables in the app (events list, persons list, etc) with this interface.
- Interconnect all the ideas here: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/3765
- Add this power to the toolbar. E.g. add an action, see user recordings and explore further.
Objective 2: Support performant querying of every insight type at a scale of billions scale events
- Phantom is happy with query performance
- Instrument and significantly improve query performance for this scale of events
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...)
Just fill out this painless form and we'll get back to you within a few days. Thanks in advance!
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