Backend Engineer role on PostHog's Billing team. PostHog is an open-source product analytics and developer platform company (Y Combinator W20, $180m+ raised, all-remote). The billing team makes sure PostHog gets paid: every dollar flows through what they build across 14+ usage-based products, subscription add-ons, and upcoming seat-based pricing with credit pools. The challenge is building billing infrastructure that is modular enough to support new pricing models, fast enough to iterate without breaking things, and reliable enough that numbers are always right.
Responsibilities
- ▹Scale the billing system to $100M+ revenue by the end of 2026 and beyond
- ▹Build billing primitives flexible enough that launching a new pricing model doesn't require rearchitecting everything
- ▹Make usage reporting and limiting near-realtime
- ▹Turn usage and messy raw invoice data into actionable internal reports, accurate forecasts, and compliant financials
- ▹Optimize performance of the above systems
- ▹Implement a new ledger-based revenue model and rebuild dashboards and investor reports on top of it
- ▹Make billing the source of truth for pricing, subscriptions, and invoicing
- ▹Ship multiple pricing launches and changes, including new pricing models
Requirements
- ▹Strong backend engineer, with Python, SQL, and complex data modeling feeling like home
- ▹Comfort and enthusiasm for edge cases
- ▹Experience with data pipelines, task queues, and workflow orchestration (Celery, with increasing use of Temporal and Dagster)
- ▹Bias toward automation: building tools to avoid repeating manual work
- ▹Treating error handling, rollbacks, and retries as the actual work, not TODOs to get to later
- ▹Self-direction: having started a company, led a major project from scratch, or shipped an impressive side project
Nice to have
- ▹Having built and scaled usage-based billing systems before
- ▹Excitement about revenue modeling, forecasting, and accounting ledgers
- ▹Familiarity with billing/accounting concepts such as Q2C, AR, B2R, GAAP, ASC 606, NRR
Soft skills
Self-directed, autonomous working styleCross-team collaboration (billing touches product, finance, GTM, and marketing)Comfort with ambiguity and undefined requirementsAttention to detail and rigor