Founding Backend Engineer

About ClickHouse

Recognized on the 2025 Forbes Cloud 100 list, ClickHouse is one of the most innovative and fast-growing private cloud companies. With more than 3,000 customers and ARR that has grown over 250 percent year over year, ClickHouse leads the market in real-time analytics, data warehousing, observability, and AI workloads.

The company’s sustained, accelerating momentum was recently validated by a $400M Series D financing round. Over the past three months, customers including Capital One, Lovable, Decagon, Polymarket, and Airwallex have adopted the platform or expanded existing deployments. These customers join an established base of AI innovators and global brands such as Meta, Cursor, Sony, and Tesla.

We’re on a mission to transform how companies use data. Come be a part of our journey!

About the team

Most providers make customers migrate their data to them. We're doing the opposite: bringing ClickHouse Cloud into the environments our customers already trust, so their data stays useful right where it lives.

Those environments come in a few shapes. Some are major cloud data platforms that run ClickHouse as a native service, so customers get it without leaving the tool they already use. Some are BI and visualization tools that need ClickHouse to show up as a fast, first-class data source behind their dashboards. And some are developer and data platforms we connect through marketplaces and identity federation with a couple of clicks to link an account. The goal is the same every time: ClickHouse should feel like a first-class citizen in every environment.

As the founding backend engineer, you'll set the technical defaults for this team. You'll have end-to-end ownership, but you'll also work inside the constraints of platforms you don't own: thin documentation, unfamiliar deployment topologies, and timelines governed by partner approval cycles. A lot of the challenge is engineering across trust boundaries you don't fully control. You won't be doing it alone. You'll work closely with the team's engineering manager and a small founding group that will grow around you, but you'll be the one setting the technical direction. If that sounds like your kind of challenge, let's talk.

What you'll do

You'll own an integration end to end: the design, the code, and the production system that keeps running after launch. You're setting the technical defaults a growing team will inherit, so the early decisions matter.

Day to day, that looks like:

• Owning the architecture: auth and identity flows, multi-tenancy, how data moves and where it's allowed to live, performance, and what happens in production
• Running what you build. You'll be on-call for your own work from early on, before there's a dedicated platform to lean on, which means owning the infrastructure, CI, deployment, and observability behind it
• Working on top of external platforms you can't change, and being straight about which risks are yours to manage and which aren't
• Partnering closely with the internal teams whose services you depend on: asking clearly, agreeing on interfaces, and finding ways to keep moving instead of waiting around to be unblocked

We'd also expect you to have opinions about where this should go, and to write them down. A lot of what shapes the team's direction starts as a doc.

About you

You don't need to have experience of every single point, but these are the attributes of someone who will perform well in this role:

• 5+ years building software, with a good chunk of it on data-heavy or integration-flavored systems
• Solid backend and systems instincts. You can reason about deployment topology, multi-tenancy, and data movement, and you're comfortable owning architectural tradeoffs you'll have to live with later
• You've worked with modern auth protocols, service principals, and identity federation, and you know how to get it right across a trust boundary
• You've built on someone else's platform and know what that's actually like: incomplete docs, unintended breaking changes, etc.
• You're comfortable in ambiguity. You can ship before the spec is finished, make sensible calls under uncertainty, and flag the decisions that'll be hard to undo instead of quietly baking them in.
• You're good with other engineers. Much of the work runs through teams you don't own, and you earn their trust by how you think, not just what you commit.
• You're mainly a backend engineer, but you're comfortable enough in JavaScript / TypeScript to jump in when it helps
• You use AI tools well and honestly. Reach for Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or whatever helps, and be clear about where you did and didn't
• You write well. Most of how we coordinate happens in design docs, PRs, and RFCs

Nice to have

None of these are required, but any of them would be a bonus:

• Familiarity with a major cloud data or analytics platform ecosystem
• Real depth in auth and identity federation, or experience shipping through a partner marketplace or certification process
• Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS platforms, or the isolation and deployment topology behind them
• Working knowledge of ClickHouse, or another columnar / OLAP engine