ClickHouse Operations Engineer

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 focussed 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.

• Familiarize yourself with ClickHouse and its applications in a fast-growing company, and be prepared to discuss your experience and knowledge in the interview.
• Showcase your problem-solving skills by providing examples of complex issues you've troubleshooted and resolved in previous roles.
• Highlight your experience working in a remote or distributed team environment, and your ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams.
• Be prepared to discuss your understanding of data warehousing and analytics concepts, and how you've applied this knowledge in previous roles.
• Show enthusiasm for PostHog's products and services, and a willingness to learn and adapt to new technologies and tools.
• Prepare to discuss your experience with automation tools, containerization, and cloud-based infrastructure, and how you've applied these skills in previous roles.
• Be prepared to provide examples of your experience working with AI-powered tools and technologies, and how you've applied this knowledge in previous roles.