Senior Software Engineer - ClickHouse

<p>We’re a global team of over 400+ people, working together to push the boundaries of open-source technology and multi-cloud solutions. Our vision is to help developers, builders, and creators bring their ideas to life with speed and simplicity, by providing a cloud data platform that makes open-source databases, search, streaming, and application infrastructure easily accessible to everyone. </p> <h2>The Role</h2> <p>We're looking for a Senior or Staff Backend Engineer to anchor our small, focused ClickHouse team. You'll own hard technical problems end to end on the platform behind our managed ClickHouse service - from database internals and backup/restore correctness to the data engineering tooling that connects ClickHouse to the wider ecosystem.</p> <p>This is a role with real technical ownership. You'll write RFCs and design documents that change how we build, scope and lead multi-quarter initiatives, and influence the product roadmap for ClickHouse and its ecosystem - streaming ingestion, CDC, benchmarking, and analytics tooling. You'll also mentor the engineers around you and raise the bar for how the team works.</p> <p>We expect you to be equally comfortable designing a new architecture and diving into a production incident - reading ClickHouse source code, untangling a replication race condition, or root-causing a flaky distributed test.</p> <h2>What You'll Do</h2> <ul> <li>Design and lead major platform initiatives: think coordination-service migrations (ZooKeeper → ClickHouse Keeper), backup/restore architecture, cluster topology, sharding, and node lifecycle management</li> <li>Build data engineering tooling around ClickHouse - streaming ingestion pipelines (Kafka → ClickHouse, Postgres → ClickHouse), schema conversion and evolution, integration frameworks, and fault-isolation between data sources</li> <li>Own the ClickHouse version lifecycle: qualify new LTS releases, diagnose upstream regressions, and take releases from early availability to GA</li> <li>Debug deep into the stack - ClickHouse internals (replication, access control, MergeTree, materialized views), distributed coordination, object storage (S3/GCS/Azure), DNS and networking, TLS</li> <li>Write RFCs and drive architectural decisions that extend beyond the team, including security and infrastructure changes</li> <li>Influence the roadmap: scope epics, break down initiatives into deliverable work, and shape what the team builds next - including commercial aspects like plans, sizing, and capacity</li> <li>Mentor engineers on the team through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing - multiply the team, don't just add to it</li> <li>Keep the lights on with pride: production incident response, observability improvements, CI performance, and test reliability are part of the craft</li> </ul> <h2>What We're Looking For</h2> <p><strong>Must have:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Expert Python development skills</strong> - you write clean, production-grade async Python and have architected substantial systems with it, including decomposing large codebases into well-factored components</li> <li><strong>ClickHouse experience</strong> - operating it at scale, query optimization, or upstream contributions</li> <li><strong>C++</strong> - ability to read and contribute to database engine code</li> <li><strong>Deep database internals knowledge</strong> - replication, access control, storage engines, backup/restore semantics; you're comfortable reading database source code (ClickHouse is C++) to root-cause behavior</li> <li><strong>Distributed systems depth</strong> - consensus/coordination services (ZooKeeper, Keeper), race conditions,