Backend Engineer, ClickHouse
- Company
- Aiven
- Location
- Finland
- Level
- Mid
- Posted
- 29.09.2026
Job description
We’re a global team of over 400 people, working together to push the boundaries of open-source technology and multi-cloud solutions. Our vision is to help developers, builders, and creators bring their ideas to life with speed and simplicity, by providing a cloud data platform that makes open-source databases, search, streaming, and application infrastructure easily accessible to everyone. The Role We're looking for a Backend Engineer to join our small, focused ClickHouse team. You'll work on the systems that power our managed ClickHouse service – building, scaling, and operating infrastructure that thousands of customers depend on daily. You'll write Python that orchestrates database lifecycle operations, dig into Linux internals when things get interesting, and ship features through a well-established CI/CD pipeline. You'll work in a modern async-first Python codebase alongside engineers who care about code quality, type safety, and automation. If you have experience with ClickHouse internals or C++ – even better. But what matters most is strong backend fundamentals and a genuine interest in databases and distributed systems. What You'll Do Design, build, and maintain backend services in Python (FastAPI, asyncio, psycopg2) that manage the ClickHouse service lifecycle Work with CI/CD pipelines (Buildkite, GitHub Actions) to ship code reliably and often Investigate and resolve production issues across the stack – from Python application code down to Linux system behavior Contribute to technical planning within a small team where your input directly shapes the roadmap Write well-tested, type-checked code and participate in thorough code reviews Use AI coding tools as part of your daily workflow to accelerate development What We're Looking For Must have: Solid Python development skills -- you write clean, production-grade Python and understand async patterns (asyncio, aiohttp) Strong understanding of databases -- you know how relational and analytical databases work under the hood, not just how to query them CI/CD experience -- you've built and maintained delivery pipelines, not just used them Familiarity with automated testing -- unit, integration, and system tests are part of how you work Experience with AI coding tools -- you actively use AI-assisted development in your workflow and understand how to get the most out of it Distributed systems awareness -- you understand the challenges of running services across multiple nodes and regions Fluent English -- written and verbal Nice to have: ClickHouse experience -- operational knowledge, query optimization, or contributions to the project Deep Linux knowledge (Fedora preferred) -- comfortable with systemd, process management, filesystem internals, and debugging at the OS level C++ or C -- ability to read and contribute to database engine code Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) with Terraform or similar IaC tools PostgreSQL operational experience Software and network security kn