Senior Database Administrator (ClickHouse)

Department: Infrastructure

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Remote

Reporting To: Didar Moldabekov

Description

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the reliability and performance of our production ClickHouse clusters, whether self-hosted on Kubernetes or running on managed ClickHouse services.
• Design a standard architecture and tooling that let us grow to dozens of multi-node clusters without the operational work growing at the same pace.
• Manage the whole cluster lifecycle as code: provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, and migrations.
• Build monitoring and alerting that catch problems before users notice them.
• Own backups and disaster recovery, and test restores regularly.
• Keep clusters secure by default.
• Plan capacity and keep infrastructure costs under control.
• Be the go-to person on ClickHouse for developers, DevOps engineers, other DBAs, and engineering leadership, from schema design and data ingestion to query performance.
• Handle routine database requests and automate as many of them as you can.
• Step in during rare production emergencies, including outside business hours. Afterwards, lead the root-cause analysis on the database side and contribute to the postmortem.
• Keep documentation and runbooks up to date, and share what you know with the team.

What you’ll bring:

• Deep, DBA-level knowledge of ClickHouse from running it in production. You should understand how it stores, merges, replicates, and queries data, and be able to explain why a cluster behaves the way it does. Strong SQL is part of this, including optimising complex analytical queries and reviewing schema design.
• Ability to design architecture and automation that holds up across dozens of multi-node clusters. Experience running a large fleet of databases (dozens or hundreds of instances) is a strong advantage, and the engine does not have to be ClickHouse.
• You have run and maintained stateful workloads on Kubernetes in production, well beyond the initial deployment.
• Production use of a Kubernetes operator to run databases. Any engine counts, for example CloudNativePG, Zalando Postgres Operator, Altinity, or the official ClickHouse operator.
• Experience with version upgrades, backup and restore, and migrating large datasets between clusters or regions with zero or minimal downtime.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across the whole stack, from queries and schema design down to Kubernetes, Linux, storage, and networking.
• A proactive approach to database health. You have built monitoring and alerting with any modern observability stack, and you act on early warning signs before they turn into incidents.
• Database security in practice: encryption in transit and at rest, access control, and secrets management.
• Infrastructure as code with any mainstream tool, plus at least one programming or scripting language for automation.
• You have hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure on any major provider, as opposed to only using a platform that another team runs.
• Clear communication, written and spoken, with engineers and with leadership, whether the subject is architecture, performance, an incident, a risk, or a cost. You should be able to take a problem from investigation to production fix on your own.
  
  

• Hands-on work on the source code of a Kubernetes operator for databases, as a developer or contributor.
• Practical use of AI tools for database observability or for automating routine operational tasks.
• A background in highly regulated environments.
• Any Kubernetes or cloud certifications.

What we offer:

• Full-time B2B contract
• Fully remote setup
• Up to 20% tax allowance
• 22 paid leave days annually
• Stock options (ESOP) in a fast-scaling, pre-IPO company
• Flexi benefits you can use for wellness, travel, or learning
• Work alongside a high-performing, international engineering team in a global fintech unicorn