ClickHouse Operations Engineer

ClickHouse Team

  • Location

    Remote (US)

  • Timezone(s)

    GMT +2:00 to GMT -8:00

About PostHog

We equip every developer to build successful products.

We started with open-source product analytics, launched out of Y Combinator's W20 cohort.

We've since shipped more than a dozen products, including a built-in data warehouse, a customer data platform, and Max 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 messaging, customer analytics, ai task creation and coding based on customer data, logs and support analytics.

Our values are not a poster on the wall full of aspiration. They’ve come from how we really work, day in day out.

PostHog is open source product led, and a default alive company that is well funded.

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.

What’s in it for you?

Now that we've told you what you'll be building with us, let's talk about what we'll be building for you.

Meet the ClickHouse Team

We build and maintain a scalable, cost-efficient storage and query engine that meets both current and future product needs. This includes optimizing ClickHouse, supporting multiple query types with tunable performance, and ensuring data is stored once, durably, and efficiently accessible across tools.

Team members

Does pineapple belong on pizza?

75% say YES!

We have a set system for compensation as part of being transparent. Salary varies based on location and level of experience.

Learn more about compensation

Location

(based on market rates)

Level

Step

Salary calculator

  1. Benchmark (United States - San Francisco, California) $243,000
  2. Level modifier 1
  3. Step modifier 0.95 - 1.04
Salary $230,850 - $252,720+ significant equity
We are open to paying well beyond these ranges for exceptional talent. If this is you, please apply.

  • Generous, transparent compensation & equityGenerous, transparent compensation & equity
  • Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)
  • Two meeting-free days per weekTwo meeting-free days per week
  • Home officeHome office
  • Coworking creditCoworking credit
  • Private health, dental, and vision insurance.Private health, dental, and vision insurance.
  • Training budgetTraining budget
  • Access to our Hedge HouseAccess to our Hedge House
  • Carbon offsettingCarbon offsetting
  • Pension & 401k contributionsPension & 401k contributions
  • We hire and pay locallyWe hire and pay locally
  • Company offsitesCompany offsites

Get more details about all our benefits on the Careers page.

Data at PostHog - Mission

Data Team's mission is to provide a storage and query engine that meets these requirements:

  • Continue to meet the needs of the product today now and in the future
  • Maintain and optimize our current ClickHouse deployment
  • Elastically scale our capacity with little effort
  • Support multiple query quality of service (QOS) guarantees (Real-time, Batch, etc.)
  • Data is stored once and queryable from the appropriate tool
  • Queries are optimized for cost and performance
  • Tunable execution performance to allow trade-offs between cost and performance
  • Storage is durable

Data Team's Mission at PostHog

Data Team's mission is to provide a storage and query engine that meets these requirements:

  • Continue to meet the needs of the product today now and in the future
  • Maintain and optimize our current ClickHouse deployment
  • Elastically scale our capacity with little effort
  • Support multiple query quality of service (QOS) guarantees (Real-time, Batch, etc.)
  • Data is stored once and queryable from the appropriate tool
  • Queries are optimized for cost and performance
  • Tunable execution performance to allow trade-offs between cost and performance
  • Storage is durable

In service of this mission, our goals are:

Goals for Q4 2025:

ClickHouse Tooling

  • Migrations service (P0) - Paweł Szczur

    • Make it easy for developers to apply changes to the ClickHouse schema
  • Chargeback (P1) - Paweł Szczur, Jovan Sakovic

    • Let product teams know about query tagging properly
    • Reject queries that are not tagged
    • Proactively notify teams of bad performance
    • Report top ClickHouse cost per team
  • SlopCop (query scheduling) (P1) - Jovan Sakovic, Paweł Szczur

    • Avoid retrying queries that are already running
    • Query prioritization
  • ClickHouse MCP for internal users (P2) - James Greenhill

  • ClickHouse Handbook(s) (P1) - Jovan Sakovic

    • Collab on HQL Handbook

ClickHouse Ops

  • US resharding to 16 shards (P0) - Daniel Escribano, James Greenhill

  • Backup restore procedure (P0) - Daniel Escribano

    • Automated backup restore procedure
  • ClickHouse security (P1) - Daniel Escribano

    • More constrained privilege on the users' access to the cluster
    • Cluster locked down
    • Audit log of activity on clusters

We do 2-3 short interviews, then pay you to do some real-life (or close to real-life) work.

  • 1
    Application (You are here)
    Our talent team will review your application

    We're looking to see how your skills and experience align with our needs.

  • 2
    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.

  • 3
    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.

  • 4
    Founder interview
    30 minutes

    You have reached the final boss. It's time to chat with James or Tim.

  • 5
    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!

  • 6
    Offer
    Pop the champagne (after you sign)

    If everyone is happy, we’ll make you an offer to join us - YAY!

(Now for the fun part...)

Just fill out this painless form and we'll get back to you within a few days. Thanks in advance!

Seriously, just write a couple of sentences about why you love us and you'll be doing better than 90% of applications.

For this role we're looking for people that have worked on optimizing ClickHouse beyond being a 'user'.

Questions about this page? or post a community question.