ClickHouse Operations Engineer

Things we care about Transparency: Everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, our strategy, and how we work, in our public company handbook. Internally, we share revenue, notes and slides from board meetings, and fundraising plans, so everyone has the context they need to make good decisions. Autonomy: We don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what’s going to have the biggest impact on our customers, and what they find interesting and motivating to work on. Engineers lead product teams and make product decisions. Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed. Shipping fast: Why not now? We want to build a lot of products; we can’t do that shipping at a normal pace. We’ve built the company around small teams – autonomous, highly-efficient groups of cracked engineers who can outship much larger companies because they own their products end-to-end. Time for building: Nothing gets shipped in a meeting. We’re a natively remote company. We default to async communication – PRs > Issues > Slack. Tuesdays and Thursdays are meeting-free days, and we prioritize heads down building time over perfect coordination. This will be the most productive job you’ve ever had. Being weird: Weird means redesigning an already world-class website for the 5th time. It means shipping literally every product that relates to customer data. It means building an objectively unnecessary developer toy with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it’s fun. What you’ll be doing ClickHouse is the core piece of infrastructure at PostHog. Every product and customer relies on it to ingest, store, and query data. We need someone to automate, manage, and maintain ClickHouse as we grow towards capturing trillions of events per year and having one of the world’s largest clusters. This includes ClickHouse operations and scaling infrastructure, as well as node and instance-level performance optimization. We want to ensure that we have the right hardware deployed at the right time for each workload on ClickHouse. You’ll build systems and automations for the provisioning and scaling of our large ClickHouse clusters, handling over 100 PB’s of data. You’ll have the ability to investigate and experiment using the latest hardware that cloud providers have to offer in order to find the optimal setup for our solution. And yes, you’ll have a budget to do this. You’ll be using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes to automate the dynamic provisioning of instances and work on a bleeding edge ClickHouse implementation, like open format backed tables, and not just maintenance. We’re also building a query optimizer for ClickHouse, which means you will work on query performance tooling. You’ll fit right in if You bring OLAP database experience. This role is focussed on ClickHouse, but if you bring strong experience with other OLAP databases, that’s great. We’re looking for people that went into the internals of ClickHouse and other OLAP databases, not high level users. You bring experience in automating dynamic provisioning instances. Strong experience with utilizing Terraform, Ansible and K8s is important. You bring experience with scale and complexity! We’re building and operating high-scale complex data storage solutions, we need you to have experience with the challenges this brings. You bring the stack we need. We build using Python, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, AWS, and Zookeeper (an alternative to Zookeeper is fine). You’re ready to do the best work of your career. We have incredible distribution, a big financial cushion and an amazing team. There’s probably no better place to see how far you can go. If this sounds like you, we should talk. We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know. Meet the ClickHouse team We run PostHog’s central data store: a self-managed, multi-petabyte ClickHouse fleet that’s reliable, fast, cost efficient, and secure. That means durable, replicated storage with workloads isolated to limit the blast radius of failures, each workload running on the right size and class of nodes with data intelligently tiered, a topology that keeps cost in check as we grow, and tightly controlled access with short-lived, easily rotated secrets. Salary We have a set system for compensation as part of being transparent. Salary varies based on location and level of experience. We are open to paying well beyond these ranges for exceptional talent. If this is you, please apply. Benefits Generous, transparent compensation & equity Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!) Two meeting-free days per week Home office Coworking credit Private health, dental, and vision insurance Training budget Access to our Hedge House Carbon offsetting Pension & 401k contributions We hire and pay locally Company offsites Your team’s mission and objectives The ClickHouse team’s mission is to provide a central data store for PostHog that is reliable, fast, cost efficient, and secure. We run PostHog’s self-managed, multi-petabyte ClickHouse fleet. We provide a platform that is: Reliable – replicated, durable storage with backups and regularly tested restores, workloads isolated to limit the blast radius of failures, and upgrades and operations that don’t cause downtime Fast – each workload runs on the right size and class of nodes, with data intelligently tiered across storage Cost efficient – data stored compactly and compressed, with a cluster topology that keeps cost in check as we grow Secure – access tightly controlled, secrets short-lived and easily rotated, and data protected in transit and at rest Q4 2026 objectives: Q4 is about getting the smaller JSON events store and our ClickHouse fork into production, while making the fleet easier to operate and customer data easier to delete. Ship JSON events and the ClickHouse fork Reliable data deletion Secure access and tested upgrades Make ClickHouse operations self-driving Ship the ClickHouse fork with confidence Interview process We do 2-3 short interviews, then pay you to do some real-life (or close to real-life) work. Application: Our talent team will review your application. We’re looking to see how your skills and experience align with our needs. Culture interview: 30-min video call. Our goal is to explore your motivations to join our team, learn why you’d be a great fit, and answer questions about us. Technical interview: 45 minutes, varies by role. You’ll meet the hiring team who will evaluate skills needed to be successful in your role. No live coding. Culture & Motivation interview: 20 minutes, varies by role. You have reached the final boss. It’s time to chat with one of our Blitzscale team members. PostHog SuperDay: Paid day of work. You’ll meet a few more members of the team and work on an independent project. It’s challenging, but most people say it’s fun, and we’ll pay you $1,000 for your efforts! Offer: Pop the champagne (after you sign). If everyone is happy, we’ll make you an offer to join us – YAY!