SRE- Clickhouse Team

## **About PostHog** We're shipping[ every product that companies need ](https://posthog.com/handbook/why-does-posthog-exist) to run their business from their first day, to the day they IPO, and beyond. The operating system for folks who build software. We started with open-source product analytics,[ launched out of Y Combinator's W20 cohort ](https://posthog.com/handbook/story). We've since shipped[ more than a dozen products ](https://posthog.com/products), including: - [ A built-in data warehouse ](https://posthog.com/docs/data-warehouse), so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights. - [ A customer data platform ](https://posthog.com/docs/cdp), so they can send their data wherever they need with ease. - [ PostHog AI ](https://posthog.com/ai), an AI-powered analyst that answers product questions, helps users find useful session recordings, and writes custom SQL queries. Next on the roadmap are CRM, Workflow, revenue analytics, and support products. When we say every product that companies need to run their business, we really mean it! We are: 1. **Product-led**. More than 100,000 companies have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit. 2. [** Default alive **](https://paulgraham.com/aord.html). Revenue is growing 10% MoM on average, 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 $100m from some of the world's top[ investors ](https://posthog.com/handbook/strategy/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 ](https://posthog.com/deskhog). ## **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 ](https://posthog.com/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 ](https://posthog.com/handbook/wide-company) and[ make product decisions ](https://posthog.com/handbook/which-products). Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed. - **Shipping fast:** [ Why not now? ](https://posthog.com/handbook/values#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 ](https://posthog.com/founders/cracked-manifesto) 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 ](https://posthog.com/handbook/company/culture#were-on-the-makers-schedule), 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 ](https://posthog.com/deskhog) with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it's fun. ## **Who we're looking for** We’re looking for people that like deep ownership of production systems, people that are not afraid of working with stateful infrastructure and love working in AWS, VMs, automation, and making messy systems reliable. In general we seek SRE’s who are: - **Enthusiastic drivers.** We need proactive people that can fully own projects and get them done, and know to get help when needed. "Are we there yet?" is the wrong question. - **Optimistic problem solvers.** Things get hard here sometimes, whether it's scaling, shipping complex products, handling a stream of support requests, or trying to ship something that touches multiple teams. We need people who won't get disheartened, and will collaborate, iterate, and ship their way out of anything. - **Grown ups.** We’re an international bunch of weirdos, but one thing unites us: everyone is kind, considerate, and professional towards each other.[ This isn't about age or experience ](https://posthog.com/handbook/company/grown-ups), it's about being low-ego, flexible, and respectful. - **Genuine builders.** PostHog is full of people who just love building stuff, people who would still be building software even if there wasn't a paycheck at the end. If this sounds like you, we should talk. ## **What you'll be doing** We run one of the largest self-managed ClickHouse installations on AWS, already at petabyte scale, and we’re actively preparing it for the next 10–50× of growth. This role sits at the centre of that effort. You won’t be in a typical “keep the lights on” SRE role. The work is about turning a fast-growing, stateful system into a predictable, well-automated platform. (provisioning, scaling, rebalancing, recovery) That means reducing operational stress, designing safe automation for data-heavy workloads, and building the tooling and patterns that let the system scale without scaling human effort. You’ll work on the kind of problems that only show up at large scale (petabytes of data, thousands of cores, constant ingestion). - Managing large fleets of EC2-based VMs, disks, and networking for data-intensive workloads - Improving operational tooling around deploys, schema changes, backups, restores, and incident response - Working closely with ClickHouse engineers to turn database-level needs into infra-level solutions - Reducing operational load by identifying repeat pain points and eliminating them through code and self-healing automation - Participating in on-call and incident response, with a strong focus on making incidents rarer over time - You’ll have room to design and automate, not just respond to alerts. You should join this team if you like deep ownership of production systems, and are not afraid of working with stateful infrastructure ## **Requirements** - Strong experience operating production infrastructure on AWS - Hands-on experience with VM-based systems (EC2), not just managed PaaS - Experience automating infrastructure using tools like Terraform, Ansible, or similar - Solid understanding of Linux systems (disk, memory, networking, failure modes) - Experience supporting stateful systems (databases, queues, storage systems, etc.) - Ability to debug and reason about performance and reliability issues in production - You’re comfortable owning systems end-to-end, including on-call responsibilities You don’t need to be a ClickHouse expert on day one. We’ll teach you the database internals, but you do need to enjoy owning complex infrastructure. ## **Nice to have** - Prior experience with ClickHouse or other analytical databases - Experience operating systems at very large data scale - Familiarity with Kubernetes (helpful, but not the core of this role) _If you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you - we're happy to accommodate!_ _#LI-DNI_