Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Job description
About Mixpanel:

Mixpanel is a leading product analytics software company, currently helping the world answer 81 million product questions every year. Our pioneering event-based tracking solution gives product teams the ability to gain insights into how to best acquire, convert, and retain their users across web and mobile platforms.

Powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use, Mixpanel enables teams to learn from their user data and innovate rapidly in creating winning products. Today, we serve nearly 7,000 paying customers through seven offices globally in our quest to provide the most in-depth product analytics that everyone can use and trust.

We are actively recruiting for multiple Software Engineers across different levels for our org!

About the role

Mixpanel is powered by a custom distributed database. This system ingests more than 1 Trillion user-generated events every month while ensuring end-to-end latencies of under a minute and queries typically scan more than 1 Quadrillion events over the span of a month. Over the last year, our inbound traffic has doubled. As our existing customers grow in volume and we add new ones, we expect this growth in traffic to continue. The infrastructure engineering teams are responsible for adding new capabilities and ensuring the smooth operation of the underlying systems.

What you'll do at Mixpanel

Mixpanel's infrastructure runs on Google Cloud Platform. We rely on Kubernetes and Docker for orchestration and containerization of our services. We primarily use Golang for writing services and all internal communication happens via GRPC. We use a combination of C and C++ wherever Golang doesn't meet our performance goals.

As an engineer on the Infrastructure teams, you'll be responsible for:
• Working with other engineers to build distributed systems that can handle data at scale
• Debugging production issues across multiple services and all levels of our infrastructure stack
• Ensuring reliability and uptime of the services you're responsible for
• Keeping an eye on how much your service costs every month and removing inefficiencies wherever possible
• Improving engineering standards and holding a high bar for code quality and simplicity
• Pushing the boundaries on how our customers analyze their product data

A typical project requires a thorough understanding of how not just your service works but also how it interacts with other components. Here are some projects we've worked on in the past to give you an idea of what to expect.
• Most of the systems in our stack provide at least once semantics. As a result, we risk duplicating events that flow through them. To overcome this limitation, we added support for event deduplication that can work at our scale. Typical approaches for deduplication don't perform well on large amounts of data, so we had to do something highly custom for our stack. We wrote about this on our engineering blog https://engineering.mixpanel.com/petabyte-scale-data-deduplication-mixpanel-engineering-e808c70c99f8 .
• Back in 2019, we migrated our ingestion API service from Python to Golang for better performance and type safety. We had to do this while ensuring that both systems handle data the same way. Because we had to compare, both, HTTP responses and transformed payloads, nothing out of the box worked for us. This blog post https://engineering.mixpanel.com/safely-rewriting-mixpanels-highest-throughput-service-in-golang-mixpanel-engineering-62cd69b5ebdb talks about how we did the actual migration without any customer visible downtime.
• In 2021, as our traffic grew almost 100%, the cost of storing data became untenable. Our engineers worked on an incremental way to eventually realize almost $30000 in savings per month https://engineering.mixpanel.com/saving-30000-a-month-by-improving-garbage-collection-c5b793bbb07d .

If projects like the ones listed above excite you, the infrastructure engineering team will be a great fit.

What we're looking for

We have openings across multiple infrastructure teams. We're looking for engineers who have:
• A strong grasp of computer science fundamentals when it comes to dealing with distributed systems and networks. You'll routinely run into issues where "one in a million" chances actually happen in production
• A knack for problem-solving and thinking from first principles. You don't shy away from any problem, no matter the scale or impact
• A bias towards shipping early and iterating. We believe in making small incremental changes to existing systems instead of large multi-quarter undertakings
• Experience building distributed systems or is eager to build that skillset

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

About our culture:

Be Open: When knowledge becomes open, we can come together as a team to collaborate around a shared purpose.

Customer Focus: Our customers’ success is our success.

Lead Change: Everyone at Mixpanel has the capacity to make an impact on the business.

Results Oriented: Driving results in a measurable way ensures we stay focused on the highest impact initiatives.

One Team: We can’t win without each other.

Why choose Mixpanel?

We’re the leader in product analytics and have raised $277M from prominent investors like Andreessen-Horowitz, Sequoia, YC, and Bain Capital. Over the years, we’ve seen a spike in our leading indicators—signups and weekly active users—which have directly translated to revenue growth. Recently, we secured a $200M Series C growth investment from Bain Capital to accelerate our product development, expand our reach to customers, and more. Our award-winning teams make our continued growth possible by finding creative solutions to ever-changing challenges with scaling, reliability, design, and service. Today, we’re the only company single-mindedly focused on enabling the world’s most innovative companies to use data to uncover insights about their customers to build better products.

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. Read more