Senior Database Reliability Engineer — ClickHouse / OLAP

VuNet Systems; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

VuNet Systems in Bengaluru (Work from office) seeks a Senior Database Reliability Engineer focused on ClickHouse/OLAP. You will own schema design, performance, recoverability, and ops tooling for a petabyte-scale analytics stack used by banks and financial services.

The role emphasizes hardening the platform, incident response, and automation within a Kubernetes-based deployment. 5+ years of experience and a strong SQL background are required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of overall experience (3+ years of hands-on ClickHouse in production).
• Experience building operational systems, runbooks, automation tooling, or alerting frameworks.
• Deep understanding of the ClickHouse storage engine, partitions, and performance trade-offs.
• Demonstrated experience recovering a ClickHouse cluster from real failure.
• Strong SQL and query optimization skills; ability to explain slow queries.
• Solid Linux fundamentals; debugging inside containers and at node level.
• Scripting proficiency in Go or Python and/or Bash for automation.
• Clear written communication for technical and customer-facing contexts.

Responsibilities

• Own capacity planning and scaling across shards and replicas, including resharding work.
• Operate replication reliably; diagnose and recover from replication and metadata failures.
• Build and rehearse backup and disaster recovery with documented RTO/RPO and drills.
• Operate ClickHouse Keeper: quorum health, ensemble scaling, and recovery when consensus is lost.
• Harden the platform: users, roles, quotas, row policies, TLS, and secrets management.
• Design and review schemas for performance, storage efficiency, and maintainability.
• Tune query and ingest performance; set resource limits for isolation.
• Build runbooks, health checks, automation, and diagnostic tooling.

Skills

ClickHouse

Kubernetes

Go/Python

Linux

SQL optimization

Education

B.Tech / Masters

Tools

ClickHouse

Kubernetes

Helm

Go

Python

Job description

Role: Senior Database Reliability Engineer — ClickHouse / OLAP

Experience: 5 - 7 Years

Education: B.Tech/Master's

Location: Bengaluru (Work from office)

Join Our Journey at VuNet

VuNet is a pioneer in Business Journey Observability, leveraging Big Data and Machine Learning to transform digital experiences across the financial services. Our deep-tech platform provides end-to-end visibility into customer journeys — empowering proactive issue resolution, operational resilience, and superior user satisfaction.

If you’ve ever used instant payment systems like UPI, chances are you’ve already experienced the power of our platform — we monitor over 28 billion digital transactions monthly** (that’s equal to watching 3 years of tik-tok videos) , touching 400 million users with leading banks and financial institutions.

VuNet is Series B funded, part of NASSCOM DeepTech Club, awarded NASSCOM’s AI Gamechanger, recognized in Forbes DGEMS 200 and by several global analysts including Gartner, Omdia.

We’re building a new category of observability purpose-built for complex digital journeys — across payments, lending, core banking and more — already powering some of the largest banks in India and MEA.

Your Role : Senior Database Reliability Engineer — ClickHouse / OLAP

At VuNet, we're building a next-generation Business Observability platform that combines full-stack engineering, big data, and machine learning to monitor customer journeys and improve digital experience. Our systems help the largest financial institutions improve their digital payment experience and drive financial inclusion across the country. ClickHouse is a core part of our analytics stack and is used heavily for Petabyte Scale,high-volume observability workloads. When it degrades, our customers see it immediately. We are looking for someone to own it. Not to babysit dashboards, but to hold real responsibility for schema design, performance, recoverability, and the operational tooling that keeps the cluster running.

What we're optimizing for is depth in ClickHouse itself — the storage engine, the failure modes,the schema decisions that determine whether a query takes 200ms or 40 seconds. That is the part that's hard to teach. Our clusters run on Kubernetes, managed by the ClickHouse operator. If you have already run stateful workloads there, great — you'll be productive faster. If you haven't, that's learnable on the job, and you'll have a platform team alongside you who knows that layer well.

If that sounds like the interesting part of the job rather than the scary part, we should talk.

Cluster operations

• Own capacity planning and scaling across shards and replicas, including resharding work.
• Operate replication reliably, and diagnose and recover from replication and metadata failures under time pressure.
• Build and rehearse backup and disaster recovery with documented RTO/RPO and restore drills that actually get executed.
• Operate ClickHouse Keeper: quorum health, ensemble scaling, and recovery when consensus is lost.
• Harden the platform: users, roles, quotas, row policies, settings constraints, TLS, and secrets management.

Schema and query design

• Design and review schemas for query performance, storage efficiency, and long-term maintainability.
• Partner with application engineers before code ships. Most ClickHouse performance problems are schema decisions made six months earlier, and we'd rather catch them at review time.
• Tune query and ingest performance across the cluster, and set resource limits that keep workloads isolated from each other.

Process, automation, and support

• Build the systems that make cluster operations repeatable: runbooks, automated health checks, remediation tooling, and diagnostic scripts that turn recurring incidents into routine, low-skill fixes.
• Build observability that catches problems early: dashboards over system.* tables and pod/node metrics, alert thresholds that mean something, and a clean alert-to-runbook mapping.
• Serve as L3 escalation for the customer-facing support team — triage incoming issues, and write self-serve tooling so routine cases never reach you.
• Lead incident response for database-layer outages, write the postmortems, and maintain the runbooks. Documentation is part of the deliverable, not an afterthought.

You'll grow into this if it's new to you — but it will become part of the job.

• Own the deployment lifecycle: operator-managed cluster definitions, Helm values, version upgrades, and rolling restarts across a multi-replica StatefulSet without data loss or split-brain — including the awkward parts, like immutable field changes, PVC retention, and rollback when an upgrade fails partway through.
• Manage persistent storage and the pod/node layer for a database workload: storage classes and volume expansion, resource requests and limits, anti-affinity and topology spread, PodDisruptionBudgets, probes, and termination grace periods long enough for a clean shutdown.

Mandatory Skills

• 5+ years of overall experience (3+ years of hands-on ClickHouse in production — running and operating it, not just querying it).
• Demonstrated experience building operational systems, not just operating them. You have designed and shipped runbooks, automated remediation tooling, alerting frameworks, or support processes that other engineers depend on — and you can point to what measurably changed as a result: fewer pages, faster recovery, escalations that stopped reaching you.
• Deep understanding of the ClickHouse storage engine: parts and merges, primary vs. skipping indexes, partitioning trade-offs, and what happens when Keeper metadata and on-disk state disagree.
• Demonstrated experience recovering a ClickHouse cluster from a real failure. We will ask you to walk us through one.
• Strong SQL and query optimization skills, with the ability to explain why a query is slow rather than making it faster by trial and error.
• Solid Linux fundamentals — you can debug inside a container and at the node level: process and memory behavior, filesystem and I/O diagnostics, and network troubleshooting.
• Scripting proficiency in Go or Python and/or Bash for automation and operational tooling.
• Clear written communication — you can explain a failure to an engineer, a support rep, and a customer-facing stakeholder without rewriting it three times