ClickHouse Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Oversee cluster operations on a large scale — managing, upgrading, and enhancing a multi-AZ ClickHouse infrastructure on Kubernetes, with established backup and recovery procedures.

• Schema and query design — focusing on table and sorting key architecture, partitioning strategies, materialized views, and optimizing queries for multi-terabyte datasets.

• Capacity planning and observability — implementing a comprehensive capacity model, storage tiering, data retention strategies, and utilizing Grafana for monitoring and alerting to ensure system health visibility.

• Data ingestion and quality assurance — establishing correctness and completeness checks on the data pipelines supplying the system; conducting reconciliations to ensure no data is lost.

• Workload segregation — ensuring that ingestion, operations, reporting, and ad-hoc analytics do not interfere with one another as read loads increase.

• AI-enhanced operations — leveraging modern tools (including MCP-based AI access to the infrastructure) that enable a small team to efficiently manage a large platform.

⛳️ Requirements

• Expertise in columnar/OLAP database engineering — ClickHouse is highly preferred; extensive experience with another columnar or large-scale time-series database (such as BigQuery, Redshift, Druid, kdb+, or similar) is also acceptable.

• Proficiency in SQL — including execution plans, query optimization, and schema design for very large datasets.

• Experience in operations/SRE — having taken on production responsibilities for a data platform, including monitoring, capacity management, incident resolution, and recovery processes.

• Familiarity with Linux and Kubernetes — comfortable working with the operational layers underlying the database.

• Knowledge of a programming language — preferably Python, but familiarity with Go, R, or MATLAB is also acceptable.

• Engineering rigor — adept at writing proposals, strategies, and architectural documents and diagrams, and effectively managing changes.

• Proficient in Git — demonstrating excellent version control practices.

• Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals — including replication, consistency, and failure modes.

• Experience in financial services is beneficial but not mandatory — domain knowledge can be acquired; operational intuition is essential.

🏝️ Benefits

• A substantial infrastructure — genuine scale and critical importance: serving as the system of record for a live trading network rather than merely a reporting tool.

• True ownership — sharing responsibility for a core business-critical platform from the outset, collaborating directly with the platform's lead engineer.

• A remarkable team — senior engineers who are passionate about their craft, fostering open collaboration, and maintaining high standards.

• Sustainable operations — designed for follow-the-sun support; on-call responsibilities are shared, contracted, and planned rather than relying on heroic efforts.

• Competitive compensation package — aligned with your local market, offering competitive pay and benefits.

• Access to modern tools — AI-assisted operations and investigative tools that minimize toil rather than adding unnecessary processes.

• Opportunities for growth — as the estate scales to multiple times its current volume, this role will expand alongside it.