Software Engineer, Distributed Systems
Mixpanel- Base salary
- $158k–$213k Published base salary range
- Location
- Hybrid - San Francisco, US Remote eligibility
- Employment
- Full-time Mid-level
About the job
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.
About the Team
Mixpanel Engineering is a small, fast-moving team focused on delivering real value to customers. The Data Runtime team owns the data execution layer that powers every Mixpanel product, ensuring that every customer query runs fast, cheap, and reliably at any scale. The team combines deep expertise in high-scale distributed systems and backend engineering, and is senior-heavy, including Staff-level engineers.
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 senior engineers and partner with peer infrastructure teams and product teams on shared architecture.
Qualifications
- 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.
- A solid foundation in distributed systems or data infrastructure.
- Experience owning a project or significant component end to end.
- Strong technical communication, especially in writing.
- Sound judgment in technical tradeoffs informed by real lessons from operating systems in production.
- High ownership and accountability.
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.
Compensation
The total target cash compensation (TTCC) includes base compensation and variable compensation in the form of either a company bonus or commissions. This position is also eligible for equity consideration and other benefits including medical, vision, and dental insurance coverage. The salary range is $157,500—$213,000 USD.
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
How We Work
Teams operate as autonomous pods, with engineering, product, and design working side by side on clear strategic goals. We value written thinking, dashboards, and demos over slide decks. We work openly using tools like Slack, GitHub, Mixpanel, Notion, Figma, and Zoom, and 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.
Application Instructions
Apply through the provided Greenhouse link.
Skills & tags
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