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Aiven is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to anchor its ClickHouse team—a small, focused group of three engineers building the platform behind Aiven's managed ClickHouse service. This is a role with genuine technical ownership and depth.
You will own hard technical problems end-to-end: from database internals and backup/restore correctness to data engineering tooling that connects ClickHouse to the broader ecosystem. You'll design and lead major platform initiatives including coordination-service migrations (ZooKeeper to ClickHouse Keeper), backup/restore architecture, cluster topology, sharding, and node lifecycle management. You'll build data engineering tooling around ClickHouse—streaming ingestion pipelines (Kafka to ClickHouse, Postgres to ClickHouse), schema conversion and evolution, integration frameworks, and fault isolation between data sources.
Key responsibilities include owning the ClickHouse version lifecycle (qualifying new LTS releases, diagnosing upstream regressions, taking releases from early availability to GA), debugging deep into the stack (ClickHouse internals including replication, access control, MergeTree, materialized views, distributed coordination, object storage, DNS, networking, TLS), writing RFCs and driving architectural decisions that extend beyond the team, influencing the roadmap by scoping epics and shaping what the team builds next, mentoring engineers through design reviews and pairing, and maintaining production systems with pride through incident response and observability improvements.
Required qualifications: expert Python development skills with production-grade async systems; ClickHouse experience at scale, query optimization, or upstream contributions; C++ ability to read and contribute to database engine code; deep database internals knowledge (replication, access control, storage engines, backup/restore semantics); distributed systems depth (consensus/coordination services, race conditions, cluster topology, failure modes); data engineering experience (streaming pipelines, Kafka, schema management); strong Linux and cloud fundamentals (object storage, networking, DNS, TLS); track record of technical leadership (RFCs, multi-quarter initiatives, mentoring); product sense connecting engineering to customer impact and pricing; experience with AI coding tools; and fluent English.
Nice-to-have skills include CDC and analytics ecosystem experience (Debezium, Iceberg, lakehouse formats), benchmarking and performance engineering, and security engineering exposure.
