Engineering hiring at PostHog
Engineers make up around 60% of our team, and we are almost always hiring for Engineering roles. Please check our careers page for our open roles.
What we are looking for in Engineering hires
Beyond the specific skills listed in the job description, we generally look for:
- Experience with relevant technologies (Python or similar, React or similar, something to do with big data is a bonus)
- We don't care how many years of professional experience you have, but depending on our current team structure we may be looking for more or less experienced people for a role - if that's the case, we will be explicit in the job spec
- Has built something from scratch, ideally with minimal outside help
- You may have been the founder of a startup, or built an impressive side project. You may have also worked on a project at work where you were the only developer.
- Communication skills
- More so than other companies, all of our communication is written and public for the world to see. Good written communication is key.
- User-centric
- Our engineering team work very closely with our users - they do customer support, demos, and help with implementation. All potential engineers need to be excited by the prospect of getting to work directly with users.
Engineering hiring process
Culture interview
This is the usual first round interview with the People & Ops team.
Technical Interview
The technical interview round is split into two parts:
- The first part is an hour-long technical interview with one of our engineers. This might be architecture design or diving more into past technical experiences in more of a workshop style. No whiteboarding or brainteasers.
- If they pass this stage, we will then schedule a follow up 30-minute interview with Tim about your previous experiences and what motivates you.
Engineering SuperDay
The final stage of our interview process is the PostHog SuperDay. This is a paid full day of work with us, which we can flexibly arrange around your schedule.
For the Full Stack role, the task involves building a small web service (both backend and frontend) over a full day. The task is designed to be too much work for one person to complete in a day, in order to get a sense of your ability to prioritize.
An Engineering SuperDay usually looks like this (there is a degree of flexibility due to time zone differences):
- Kick-off session with an engineer
- Time to focus on the task, we can provide support via your personal slack channel (we will communicate your main point of contact via email before the SuperDay)
- Meet James, our CEO
- On days where we have company-wide meetings, we will invite you along to that and give you a chance to introduce yourself. On days without company wide meetings, we will arrange for you to meet a few members of our team for a casual lunch/coffee break
- Depending on the time zone, we might arrange a wrap up session at the end of the day
Overall, you should spend at least 80% of your time and energy on the task and less than 20% on meeting people, as we will base our decision on your output of the day. However, we encourage everyone to use the Slack channel as much as needed for any questions or problems.
In line with our values and culture, you might get short replies like "step on toes" or "bias for action".