SRE- Clickhouse Team

ClickHouse Team

  • Location

    Remote (US)

  • Timezone(s)

    GMT -3 to GMT -8

About PostHog

We're shipping every product that companies need 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. We've since shipped more than a dozen products, including:

  • A built-in data warehouse, so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights.

  • A customer data platform, so they can send their data wherever they need with ease.

  • PostHog 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:

  1. Product-led. More than 100,000 companies have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.

  2. Default alive. 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.

  3. Well-funded. We've raised more than $100m from some of the world's top 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.

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.

  • Ambition: We want to solve big problems. We strongly believe that aiming for the best possible upside, and sometimes missing, is better than never trying. We're optimistic about what's possible and our ability to get there.

  • 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.

Who we're looking for

We’re looking for people that like deep ownership of production systems, people that are not afraid of working with stateful infrastructure and love working in AWS, VMs, automation, and making messy systems reliable.

In general we seek SRE’s who are:

  • Enthusiastic drivers. We need proactive people that can fully own projects and get them done, and know to get help when needed. "Are we there yet?" is the wrong question.

  • Optimistic problem solvers. Things get hard here sometimes, whether it's scaling, shipping complex products, handling a stream of support requests, or trying to ship something that touches multiple teams. We need people who won't get disheartened, and will collaborate, iterate, and ship their way out of anything.

  • Grown ups. We’re an international bunch of weirdos, but one thing unites us: everyone is kind, considerate, and professional towards each other. This isn't about age or experience, it's about being low-ego, flexible, and respectful.

  • Genuine builders. PostHog is full of people who just love building stuff, people who would still be building software even if there wasn't a paycheck at the end. If this sounds like you, we should talk.

What you'll be doing

We run one of the largest self-managed ClickHouse installations on AWS, already at petabyte scale, and we’re actively preparing it for the next 10–50× of growth. This role sits at the centre of that effort.

You won’t be in a typical “keep the lights on” SRE role. The work is about turning a fast-growing, stateful system into a predictable, well-automated platform. (provisioning, scaling, rebalancing, recovery)
That means reducing operational stress, designing safe automation for data-heavy workloads, and building the tooling and patterns that let the system scale without scaling human effort.

You’ll work on the kind of problems that only show up at large scale (petabytes of data, thousands of cores, constant ingestion).

  • Managing large fleets of EC2-based VMs, disks, and networking for data-intensive workloads

  • Improving operational tooling around deploys, schema changes, backups, restores, and incident response

  • Working closely with ClickHouse engineers to turn database-level needs into infra-level solutions

  • Reducing operational load by identifying repeat pain points and eliminating them through code and self-healing automation

  • Participating in on-call and incident response, with a strong focus on making incidents rarer over time

  • You’ll have room to design and automate, not just respond to alerts.

You should join this team if you like deep ownership of production systems, and are not afraid of working with stateful infrastructure

Requirements

  • Strong experience operating production infrastructure on AWS

  • Hands-on experience with VM-based systems (EC2), not just managed PaaS

  • Experience automating infrastructure using tools like Terraform, Ansible, or similar

  • Solid understanding of Linux systems (disk, memory, networking, failure modes)

  • Experience supporting stateful systems (databases, queues, storage systems, etc.)

  • Ability to debug and reason about performance and reliability issues in production

  • You’re comfortable owning systems end-to-end, including on-call responsibilities

You don’t need to be a ClickHouse expert on day one. We’ll teach you the database internals, but you do need to enjoy owning complex infrastructure.

Nice to have

  • Prior experience with ClickHouse or other analytical databases

  • Experience operating systems at very large data scale

  • Familiarity with Kubernetes (helpful, but not the core of this role)

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!

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) $236,000
  2. Level modifier 1
  3. Step modifier 0.95 - 1.04
Salary $224,200 - $245,440+ 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 Q1 2026:

Resharding (P0) - Daniel Escribano, Rory Shanks

  • Reshard US cluster to 8 shards

Storage optimizations (P0) - Rory Shanks

  • Tables optimizations (resharding of events_recent, person)
  • Drop unused materialized columns
  • Rewrite cohortpeople
  • Track and provide visibility into disk usage cost by team

Data deletion requests (P0) - Jovan Sakovic

  • Enable event deletion from the app based on user-defined predicates (P1)

Query cost visibility through Chargeback (P1) - Pawel Szczur

  • Continue work on chargeback reporting to track query costs
  • Provide visibility into expensive queries with tooling to help teams debug and optimize them

Workload management (P1) - Daniel Escribano

  • Implement quotas and workload management to prioritize application queries

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
    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.

  • 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!

We'll need this for the SuperDay

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

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