Software Engineer, Distributed Systems
Mixpanel · San Francisco, United States · 27d ago
About Mixpanel
Mixpanel is the leading product intelligence and analytics platform, trusted by more than 29,000 companies to help understand how people use the products they build. By combining powerful analytics with AI that knows your business, Mixpanel helps teams see what’s working, diagnose what’s not, and decide what to build next. Learn more at mixpanel.com.
About Mixpanel
Mixpanel turns data clarity into innovation. Trusted by more than 29,000 companies, including Workday, Pinterest, LG, and Rakuten Viber, Mixpanel’s AI-first digital analytics help teams accelerate adoption, improve retention, and ship with confidence. Powering this is an industry-leading platform that combines product and web analytics, session replay, experimentation, feature flags, and metric trees. Mixpanel delivers insights that customers trust. Visit mixpanel.com to learn more.
About The Team
Mixpanel Engineering is a small, fast-moving team focused on delivering real value to customers. We build powerful AI-powered product analytics while obsessing over clarity, simplicity, and delight. Engineers here own problems end to end. You can move across the stack to ship impact without being blocked by silos or heavy process. Product innovation drives our business, and product engineering teams own that responsibility.
Our OLAP engine queries over 500 trillion events; a typical blob storage system we interact with processes 300 PiB/month at 1.2 Tbps sustained, and we run many of them across the world.
The Data Runtime team owns the data execution layer that powers every Mixpanel product. We ensure that every customer query runs fast, cheap, and reliably, at any scale.
This is an exciting time to join. Mixpanel's agentic and AI-first products are driving rapid growth in query volume, and Data Runtime is making the big bets that power it. We’re investing in elastic query compute and a distributed file cache that will let us scale query workloads dramatically without scaling cost with them. We sit at the center of the data platform, interfacing daily with Query Serving, Streaming, Core Analysis, Data Foundation, Product, and other teams across the company.
The team combines deep expertise in high-scale distributed systems and backend engineering. It's a senior-heavy team, including Staff-level engineers with years of context in the engine internals, which means you'll be surrounded by people you can learn from and grow with.
About The Role
As a Software Engineer III (L3) on Data Runtime, you'll design and build the systems that execute every query at Mixpanel. You'll contribute to the technical design for complex distributed-systems projects, from prototype to global rollout, on initiatives like elastic query compute, the distributed file cache, columnar storage internals, and compaction.
You'll work alongside some of the most senior engineers at Mixpanel, partner with peer infrastructure teams (Query Serving, Streaming, Data Foundation) and product teams (Core Analysis, AI-powered experiences) on shared architecture, and have real influence over the technical direction of the compute layer that Mixpanel's AI-first future runs on.
We're Looking For Someone Who Has
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating data infra/backend systems, with a track record of shipping quality work quickly.
- A solid foundation in distributed systems or data infrastructure, and the drive to go deep.
- Experience owning a project or significant component end to end: driving the design, building it, shipping it, and running it in production.
- Strong technical communication, especially in writing, e.g., design docs, code review, async discussion across a distributed team.
- Sound judgment in technical tradeoffs, informed by real lessons from operating systems in production.
- High ownership and accountability.
- A desire to be at the forefront of the infrastructure powering AI-first analytics at thousands of companies.
Technical Skills We Value
- Languages: Go, C/C++, Python, and SQL.
- Distributed systems: sharding/partitioning, replication, distributed scheduling, work fanout/merge, consistent hashing.
- Storage & query engines: columnar formats (Arrow/Parquet or in-house equivalents), indexing, and compression.
- Caching: distributed file/block caches, admission and eviction policies, tiered storage.
- Performance engineering: profiling (pprof, perf), concurrency, memory management, benchmarking.
- Cloud & infra: GCP (GCS, GKE, Spanner) or equivalent AWS/Azure, Kubernetes.
- Reliability: observability (metrics, tracing, logging), SLOs, incident management.
- AI-augmented engineering: LLM tooling to accelerate development, triage, and operations.
How We Work
- Teams operate as autonomous pods, with engineering, product, and design working side by side on clear strategic goals. Teams have direct access to customer feedback, product usage data, business metrics, and design context.
- We start with customer problems. We reason from first principles. We challenge assumptions. We aim for simple solutions to complex problems and avoid unnecessary abstraction.
- Engineering owns execution, quality, and operations. There are no project managers, QA teams, or separate SREs. Ownership stays with the people building the product.
- We value written thinking, dashboards, and demos over slide decks. We work openly using tools like Slack, GitHub, Mixpanel, Notion, Figma, and Zoom — and we lean heavily on AI-assisted development (Claude Code and beyond).
- Our team is distributed across North America, with strong clusters in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York.
Benefits and Perks
- Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental Care
- Mental Wellness Benefit
- Generous Vacation Policy & Additional Company Holidays
- Enhanced Parental Leave
- Volunteer Time Off
- Additional US Benefits: Pre-Tax Benefits including 401(K), Wellness Benefit, Holiday Break
*please note that benefits and perks for contract positions will vary*
Culture Values
- Make Bold Bets: We choose courageous action over comfortable progress.
- Innovate with Insight: We tackle decisions with rigor and judgment - combining data, experience and collective wisdom to drive powerful outcomes.
- One Team: We collaborate across boundaries to achieve far greater impact than any of us could accomplish alone.
- Candor with Connection: We build meaningful relationships that enable honest feedback and direct conversations.
- Champion the Customer: We seek to deeply understand our customers’ needs, ensuring their success is our north star.
- Powerful Simplicity: We find elegant solutions to complex problems, making sophisticated things accessible.
Why choose Mixpanel?
We’re a leader in analytics with over 29,000 customers and $277M invested from prominent investors: like Andreessen-Horowitz, Sequoia, YC, and, most recently, Bain Capital. Mixpanel’s pioneering event-based data analytics platform offers a powerful yet simple solution for companies to understand user behaviors and easily track overarching company success metrics. Our accomplished teams continuously facilitate our expansion by tackling the ever-evolving challenges tied to scaling, reliability, design, and service. Choosing to work at Mixpanel means you’ll be helping the world’s most innovative companies learn from their data so they can make better decisions.
Mixpanel is an equal opportunity employer supporting workforce diversity. At Mixpanel, we are focused on things that really matter—our people, our customers, our partners—out of a recognition that those relationships are the most valuable assets we have. We actively encourage women, people with disabilities, veterans, underrepresented minorities, and LGBTQ+ people to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance or other similar laws that may be applicable, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We’ve immersed ourselves in our Culture and Values as our guiding principles for the impact we want to have and the future we are building.