Backend Engineer — Billing

ABOUT POSTHOG

We're shipping every product that companies need https://posthog.com/handbook/why-does-posthog-exist to run their business from their first day, to the day they IPO, and beyond. The operating system for folks who build software.

We started with open-source product analytics, launched out of Y Combinator's W20 cohort https://posthog.com/handbook/story. We've since shipped more than a dozen products https://posthog.com/products, including:

• A built-in data warehouse https://posthog.com/docs/data-warehouse, so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights.
• A customer data platform https://posthog.com/docs/cdp, so they can send their data wherever they need with ease.
• PostHog AI https://posthog.com/ai, an AI-powered analyst that answers product questions, helps users find useful session recordings, and writes custom SQL queries.

Next on the roadmap are CRM, Workflow, revenue analytics, and support products. When we say every product that companies need to run their business, we really mean it!

We Are

• Product-led. More than 100,000 companies have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.
• Default alive https://paulgraham.com/aord.html. Revenue is growing 10% MoM on average, and we're very efficient. We raise money to push ambition and grow faster, not to keep the lights on.
• Well-funded. We've raised more than $100m from some of the world's top investors https://posthog.com/handbook/strategy/investors. We're set up for a long, ambitious journey.

We're focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring exceptional teammates, shipping fast, and being as weird as possible https://posthog.com/deskhog

WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Someone has to make sure PostHog actually gets paid. That's us.

We have 14+ usage-based products, subscription add-ons, and soon seat-based pricing with credit pools. Every dollar PostHog makes flows through what we build. If we screw up, customers lose trust and churn - doesn't matter how good the product is. Execs, product, and GTM teams can't make good decisions without the data we provide.

We launch new products all the time and we always want to do what makes sense for customers rather than fit things into a rigid existing system. That means we need to build billing infrastructure that's modular enough to support whatever we throw at it next, fast enough to iterate on without breaking things, and reliable enough that the numbers are always right. Getting all three perfect at once is impossible - finding the right balance is the main challenge. Are we there yet? Not even close. But you'll help us get there faster.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Scaling our billing system to $100M+ revenue (the hundy https://www.linkedin.com/posts/posthog_scaling-with-product-led-growth-going-from-activity-7419734364248317952-GQFX) by the end of 2026, and well beyond (the billy?).
• Building billing primitives flexible enough that launching a new pricing model doesn't require rearchitecting everything.
• Making our usage reporting and limiting near-realtime.
• Turning usage and messy raw invoice data into actionable internal reports, accurate forecasts, and compliant financials.
• Making all of the above go brrr.

Example Projects

PostHog is generally very open about what we build, but our billing repo understandably isn't. Here's a taste of what we're working on right now though (see our team page https://posthog.com/teams/billing for more):

• Implementing a new, ledger-based revenue model and re-building all dashboards and investor reports on top of it.
• Making billing the source of truth for pricing, subscriptions and invoicing.
• Shipping 5+ pricing launches and changes this quarter, including two new pricing models.

YOU’LL FIT RIGHT IN IF:

• Strong backend engineer. Python, SQL, and complex data modeling should feel like home.
• Edge cases make you excited, not anxious.
• Experience with data pipelines, task queues, and workflow orchestration - we still have a lot of Celery but are leaning more into Temporal and Dagster.
• If you've done something manually twice (or seen someone else do it) - you're already building an automation or an internal tool to make it easier.
• Happy paths are maybe 10% of billing. You treat error handling, rollbacks, and retries as the actual work - not TODOs you'll "get to later".
• You don't need someone to tell you what to build. You've started a company, led a major project from scratch, or shipped an impressive side project.

Nice To Haves

• You've built and scaled usage-based billing systems before (and have the scars to prove it).
• You get weirdly excited about revenue modeling, forecasting and accounting ledgers.
• You have a decent guess which one of these we made up: Q2C / AR / B2R / GAAP / ASC 606 / NRR.

This Role Is Not For You If

• You only want to work with other engineers - billing touches every team at PostHog, from product to finance to GTM to marketing.
• You need clearly defined requirements before you start building.
• You think billing is a solved problem - we thought so too, once.

If you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you - we're happy to accommodate!