Senior Software Engineer - ClickHouse
This role involves leading the development and maintenance of Aiven's managed ClickHouse service, focusing on database internals, distributed systems, and data engineering pipelines. The engineer will design platform initiatives, mentor team members, and contribute to the product roadmap using Python and C++.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Expert Python development skills
- ClickHouse experience
- C++ proficiency
- Deep database internals knowledge
- Distributed systems depth
- Data engineering experience
- Strong Linux and cloud fundamentals
- Track record of technical leadership
- Product sense
- Experience with AI coding tools
- Fluent English
Full description
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.
The Role
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.
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.
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.
What You'll Do
- Design and lead major platform initiatives: think coordination-service migrations (ZooKeeper → ClickHouse Keeper), backup/restore architecture, cluster topology, sharding, and node lifecycle management
- 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
- Own the ClickHouse version lifecycle: qualify new LTS releases, diagnose upstream regressions, and take releases from early availability to GA
- Debug deep into the stack - ClickHouse internals (replication, access control, MergeTree, materialized views), distributed coordination, object storage (S3/GCS/Azure), DNS and networking, TLS
- Write RFCs and drive architectural decisions that extend beyond the team, including security and infrastructure changes
- 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
- Mentor engineers on the team through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing - multiply the team, don't just add to it
- Keep the lights on with pride: production incident response, observability improvements, CI performance, and test reliability are part of the craft