Senior Software Engineer - JVM Language Clients

Role Description

As a Senior Software Engineer on Language Clients, you'll be a technical owner of ClickHouse's Java client and JDBC driver, the foundation that our own Connectors team and a long list of external frameworks rely on to talk to ClickHouse.

• Your primary users are engineers: the Connectors team building ClickHouse connectors for Kafka, Flink, Spark, and others, and the broader JVM ecosystem (data ingestion tools, BI platforms, data visualizations) that consumes the driver directly.
• Your job is to make sure they have a fast, reliable, well-designed foundation and to treat their feedback as the signal for where the driver goes next.

In your first year you can expect to:

• Own the Java client and JDBC driver end-to-end: roadmap, API design, performance, release engineering, and partner-facing support.
• Drive throughput and latency work across the client and ClickHouse server.
• Partner day-to-day with the Connectors team as an embedded internal customer: understand what their connectors need from the driver, and ship it.
• Engage directly with external partners across data ingestion, and data visualization on interoperability, regressions, and roadmap alignment.
• Ship visible, measurable wins in throughput, stability, and developer experience.
• Bring opinions, artifacts, and written proposals to shape where we invest next.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a significant portion focused on data-intensive systems: drivers, SDKs, ingestion, CDC, streaming, or analytics.
• Deep Java and JVM expertise: memory model, GC tuning, profiling, and the ability to reason about throughput and latency at the level of bytes on the wire.
• Hands-on experience building or substantially extending a library that other engineers depend on.
• Strong grasp of database fundamentals: SQL, query execution, and analytical/OLAP workloads.
• Solid instincts on concurrency in the JVM: executors, reactive streams, backpressure, connection pooling, and the failure modes that come with each.
• Thoughtful, transparent use of modern AI development tools combined with strong independent design and code review judgment.
• Excellent written communication.
• Genuine open-source disposition: comfort engaging with community issues, external contributors, and public design discussions.

Requirements

• Working knowledge of JDBC internals, ADBC, or Arrow / Arrow Flight SQL.
• Experience designing or evolving wire protocols, or contributing to a widely-used network client.
• Prior contributions to open-source data infrastructure (Kafka, Spark, Flink, dbt, Debezium, Iceberg, or similar).
• Working knowledge of ClickHouse or another columnar/OLAP engine.

Benefits

• Flexible work environment - ClickHouse is a globally distributed company and remote-friendly. We currently operate in over 20 countries.
• Healthcare - Employer contributions towards your healthcare.
• Equity in the company - Every new team member who joins our company receives stock options.
• Time off - Flexible time off in the US, generous entitlement in other countries.
• A $500 Home office setup if you’re a remote employee.
• Global Gatherings – Opportunities to engage with colleagues at company-wide offsites.
• Culture - As part of a rapidly scaling startup, you will be instrumental in shaping our culture.