Backend Engineer - Europe/UK Timezone

PostHog Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Remote (EMEA)

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Own end-to-end development and operation of high-throughput, low-latency backend services that evaluate feature flags millions of times per minute, where downtime or latency directly impacts customer product releases.
• Design, build, and maintain the feature flag evaluation engine and local evaluation endpoints, ensuring reliability, stability, and performance under extreme scale.
• Transition from a read-heavy to a write-heavy architecture by developing a dedicated store for flag evaluation, decoupling it from the shared Persons database to improve scalability and fault isolation.
• Implement real-time cohorts that compute user membership on-the-fly during flag checks, eliminating delays and enabling targeting based on actions within the last five minutes.
• Develop and optimize caching layers, load shedding strategies, and request hedging mechanisms to reduce p50, p90, and p99 latencies and isolate the evaluation path from upstream failures.
• Port critical backend components from Python to Rust to improve performance, memory safety, and concurrency handling, while maintaining developer experience and code clarity.
• Build an AI-first flag management tool that allows internal AI agents to create, modify, and reason about feature flags without human interaction, using natural language and internal knowledge.
• Design and ship intuitive, self-documenting SDKs for JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, Ruby, PHP, Java, .NET, iOS, Android, Flutter, and other languages, ensuring feature flags are trivial to add and impossible to forget.
• Drive product decisions independently as part of an autonomous engineering team, choosing projects based on customer impact and personal motivation without top-down direction.
• Work asynchronously in a fully remote, meeting-free environment with Tuesdays and Thursdays designated as heads-down building days, prioritizing shipping over coordination.
• Participate in on-call rotations to respond to incidents, carry a pager, and maintain service reliability for a product used by over 450,000 organizations.
• Contribute to public company documentation and handbook, sharing architectural decisions, performance metrics, and operational learnings transparently with the entire company.
• Experiment with unconventional, "weird" product ideas — such as developer toys or redesigns — that challenge norms and serve as competitive differentiators.
• Collaborate with product teams composed of engineers who lead their own products, setting latency and uptime targets, and owning the full lifecycle from concept to deployment.
• Continuously benchmark, profile, and optimize system performance using industry-standard tools to identify bottlenecks and improve tail latency.
• Maintain and evolve infrastructure provisioning and cloud operations for backend services, ensuring cost efficiency and operational resilience.
• Ship changes rapidly without compromising service stability, using PRs over Slack, and defaulting to async communication to maximize deep work time.

🎯 Requirements

• You've built and operated systems that handle high volumes of requests or data (millions+ per minute), and you care about tail latency, caching, and distributed systems failure modes
• You're productive in Rust and Python, or confident you'll get there fast. While the app is Django, the evaluation engine and much of our backend infrastructure is in Rust or moving to it.
• You work independently. You can pick a sensible architecture, ship it faster than people expect, and drive it to done without being managed
• You ship changes quickly without breaking a service customers depend on to launch
• You're based in a European time zone

🏖️ Benefits

• Transparent access to company finances, board meeting notes, fundraising plans, and roadmap
• Fully remote work with asynchronous culture and meeting-free days (Tuesdays and Thursdays)
• Autonomy to choose what to work on based on impact and personal interest, with engineers leading product teams
• Opportunity to build "weird" and unconventional products that serve as competitive advantages
• High-impact work on systems used by over 450,000 organizations, with direct influence on product direction
• Well-funded company ($180M+ raised) with long-term stability and ambition to solve big problems

Skills & Technologies

Python

JavaScript

TypeScript

Java

Backend

Remote

Ready to Apply?

Apply Externally

You will be redirected to an external site to apply.

AI Job Fit Analysis

Pro

See exactly how your profile matches this role — strengths, skill gaps, and what to do about them.

PostHog Inc.

Visit Website

About PostHog Inc.

PostHog provides an open-source product analytics platform that lets teams track user behavior, run A/B tests, and gather feedback without sending data to third parties. The self-hosted or cloud service captures events, pageviews, feature flags, and session recordings, then surfaces insights through dashboards, funnels, retention, and cohort analysis. Engineers can instrument code once and non-technical teammates can query results using SQL or visual builders. The company maintains the core project under an MIT license and offers paid tiers for enterprise support, higher volumes, and advanced features such as correlation analysis, data pipelines, and team collaboration tools.

View Company Profile

Get more remote jobs like this

Subscribe to the weekly newsletter for similar remote roles and curated hiring updates.

Weekly remote jobs and featured talent.

No spam. Only curated remote roles and product updates. You can unsubscribe anytime.