Team Product Analytics
Product Engineer
Department
Engineering
Location
Remote (EMEA)
Timezone(s)
GMT +2 to GMT -8
About PostHog
PostHog helps engineers build better products. We provide every tool they need to figure out if what they are building is working. We want engineers to engineer their products, not their data, and to not have to hire lots of product managers to pull together context from lots of tools.
By integrating all these tools we can make this easy – no integration needed, no extra vendors, no extra JavaScript, no sending data to extra 3rd parties, and workflows to guide engineers through feature development.
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 110,000 developers have adopted PostHog. We've had huge success with our paid upgrades, 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 average 10% monthly revenue growth and are on track to hit $10m ARR in early 2024. 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.
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.
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 shipping fast, talking to users, and iterating.
About our engineering teams
Engineers work across one of our small teams. Our main product-focused engineering teams are Product Analytics, Session Replay, 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 the 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 (based on market rates)
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.
Salary calculator
- Benchmark (San Francisco) $236,000
- Location factor 1
- Level modifier 1
- Step modifier 0.95 - 1.04
Benefits
- Generous, transparent compensation & equity
- Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)
- Two meeting-free days per week
- Home office
- Coworking credit
- Private health, dental, and vision insurance.
- Training budget
- Access to our Hedge House
- Carbon offsetting
- Pension & 401k contributions
- We hire and pay locally
- 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
Q1 2024 Goals
- HogQL & Data Exploration (Julian, Marius)
- Convert ALL our insights to use HogQL as their base.
- Most product analytics insights are built in a bespoke way using our "legacy" Python codebase. This code produces ClickHouse SQL as its output, and is hard to extend, as all queries mix both platform level concerns (e.g. how "group analytics" works) and query level concerns (most optimal query for this data structure). Adding new query types or new platform features has turned out to be a nightmater with so many loose parts to consider.
- We've built the HogQL platform, which takes care of implementation details (e.g. where precisely are person properties stored) and lets users focus on writing queries. We're now rewriting all our insights to output HogQL instead of ClickHouse SQL. This will make the system more reliable, fix whole classes of bugs, and allow the end user to directly modify the generated HogQL SQL for further analysis.
- The migrated queries are also a blocker for the removal of a lot of legacy frontend code, which is often causing bugs.
- Improve the type system and get rid of
assumeNotNull
.- ClickHouse is notoriously cranky when it comes to
NULL
-s. Whenever it sees any unaccounted null anywhere, the entire row is discarded from analysis. We have several fields and properties, which are sometimesNULL
, but mostly not. We have special handling for nullable fiels in theconcat
function, and in all compersions. For example(0 != NULL)
feels like it should returntrue
, but in ClickHouse it returnsNULL
. In HogQL it returnstrue
due to our special handling. - This special handling in HogQL makes for better predictable queries, at the cost of some performance. We can optimise this further if we know a field to definitely not be
NULL
. Unfortunately this nullability information gets lost once fields pass functions and subquery boundaries. Upgrading the type system to account for this is the goal.
- ClickHouse is notoriously cranky when it comes to
- Write great docs for HogQL and data exploration nodes.
- Make sure all Data Exploration Nodes, including HogQLQuery, are documented somewhere.
- Can we build a live API playground?
- Proactively monitor query performance.
- Product Analytics frontend (Thomas, Michael)
- Clean things up now that we have PostHog 3000 and HogQL everywhere.
- Migrate Insights in the database away from "filters" onto "query"
- Purge legacy UI
- Purge legacy python insights
- Prioritise and work on any of the many ideas we have to make the app better:
- Universal Exploration view
- Reworked filtering experience
- Query builder 3000
- Notebook-first flow
- Make Product Analytics as easy as Web Analytics
- BI (Tom)
- Support non-event data sources on HogQL insights.
- Build the new querying experience, and/or integrate it into the "Explore" view.
Action plan:
- Come January, we'll take this list, split the checkboxes between the team, and keep going till it's done. ETA: end of January.
- In February (leap year 🎉), we'll make Product Analytics ~great~ spark joy again: insights UI cleanup, unified data exploration experience, adding missing analysis features (lifecycle breakdowns, etc), and in parallel work on the BI and the HogQL editing experience. What exactly we'll do and in what order is still TBD.
- In March we'll keep going. The goal is to have an amazing BI / Product Analytics / Insights / Explore / HogQL experience by the end of it.
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!
Bolded fields are required