ClickHouse Operations Engineer

ClickHouse Team

• Location

Remote

• Timezone(s)

GMT -3 to GMT -8

About PostHog

Product development used to mean manually writing code, running analysis, diagnosing bugs, and rolling out changes using dozens of tools.

PostHog makes products self-driving. It's the only platform that acts like a co-pilot for you (and your AI agents) to do it all – autonomously.

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:

• PostHog Desktop, the only AI devtool that understands your product, not just your codebase.
• A built-in data warehouse, so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights.
• PostHog AI, an AI-powered analyst that answers product questions, helps users find useful session recordings, and writes custom SQL queries.

We are:

1. Product-led. More than 450,000 organizations have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.
2. Default alive. Revenue is growing incredibly quickly, 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 $180m 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.

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 focused 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.

Your team's mission and objectives

ClickHouse at PostHog - Mission

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

Q3 2026 objectives

🧬 Cell-based architecture - (Driver: Rory Shanks)

Large customers can break smaller ones; the blast radius is huge, and changes are hard to test. Splitting things up and isolating them lets us manage all of this far better.

What we'll ship:

• A team 2 cell, set up together with the Platform Analytics Team
• Tooling to manage the different backends and migrate data between cells

📦 JSON datatype in the app - (Driver: Rory Shanks)

We have a lot of duplicated data sitting in the cluster eating disk. Newer storage formats give us more efficient disk usage, and therefore better performance.

What we'll ship:

• The app can use the JSON datatype natively (with the Platform Analytics Team)
• A rebuilt events table using the JSON datatype
• The app switched over to the new table

🔐 ClickHouse is up to date and secure - (Driver: Tommy Gilmore)

New ClickHouse versions bring big wins, so we should be able to upgrade faster. And secrets rotation shouldn't be a painful, high-risk process that can take down the app or silently break a team - secrets need to be swappable at any time with no real risk.

What we'll ship:

• Meaningful, fully automated ClickHouse version upgrade testing
• An upgrade to a new ClickHouse version
• Short-lived secrets to remove the need for manual rotation almost entirely, without creating issues for users
• Failing that: consolidated secret sources and an automated, zero-downtime way to rotate them
• An end to our reliance on the default user

🚚 ClickHouse migration system - (Driver: Pawel Szczur)

Our ClickHouse migrations suck, and our topology is very complex. We should figure out a good way of doing this.

What we'll ship:

• hclexp for all migrations in PostHog
• Good reporting and good workflows
• Automatic schema drift detection that proposes queries to fix it

🗑️ Data lifecycle management - (Driver: Pawel Szczur)

We need to delete data all the time, and our systems for it need to be top-notch.

What we'll ship:

• Self-driving DataDeletionRequests, with minimal human intervention
• Person and team deletion mapped across systems and topologies
• Per-team retention periods

🤖 Self-driving operations - (Driver: Bryan Ciaraldi)

Interrupt-driven ops has the biggest impact on the team's ability to ship: operational toil, alert noise, and "fear of breaking ClickHouse" all track to it. We make routine operations self-driving so we're only interrupted when judgment is actually required.

What we'll ship:

• ClickHouse MCP + Bedrock for diagnostic and proactive signals, with no data-protection limits on what the agent can see
• MCP that turns warning-level alerts into proposed fixes / auto-generated PRs
• A stable, low-noise alerting base that automation can build on
• High-signal ops dashboards living on the ops cluster

Interview process

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!

Apply

(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!

• Name*
• Email*
• Github*
  We'll need this for the SuperDay
• Cover letter
  Seriously, just write a couple of sentences about why you love us and you'll be doing better than 90% of applications.
• Do you have experience in ClickHouse or similar OLAP databases?* For this role we're looking for people that have worked on optimizing ClickHouse beyond being a 'user'.
• Resume/CV* Upload file or drag and drop here
• LinkedIn
• Portfolio/Personal website
• How did you hear about us?
• Where are you located? *
• Do you require sponsorship to work in your desired location?*

Submit