Senior Database Administrator (ClickHouse)

tabby; Riyadh; On-site; SAR 360,000 - 540,000; Full time

Job summary

tabby is hiring a senior ClickHouse DBA to own reliability and performance of production clusters, both on Kubernetes and managed services. You will design scalable architecture, automate lifecycle tasks, and build robust monitoring and backups.

You will partner with developers and leadership to ensure secure, cost-efficient operation at scale. The role requires deep production experience with ClickHouse, strong SQL, and hands-on Kubernetes operator usage.

Qualifications

• Production experience with ClickHouse databases including storage, merges, replication and query behavior.
• Strong SQL skills and ability to optimize complex analytical queries.
• Ability to design scalable multi-cluster architectures and automation.
• Experience running stateful workloads on Kubernetes with operators.
• Hands-on with cloud infrastructure and at least one provider.

Responsibilities

• Own reliability and performance of production ClickHouse clusters, self-hosted on Kubernetes or managed services.
• Design standard architecture and tooling to scale to dozens of multi-node clusters.
• Manage cluster lifecycle: provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, and migrations.
• Build monitoring and alerting to catch issues before users notice.
• Own backups, DR, and test restores regularly.
• Keep clusters secure by default and manage access controls.
• Plan capacity and control infrastructure costs.
• Serve as the go-to ClickHouse expert for developers, DevOps, and leadership.
• Automate routine database requests and respond to emergencies, including after-hours.

Skills

ClickHouse DBA

SQL optimization

Kubernetes

Observability

Backup and DR

Security best practices

IaC

Cloud providers

Incident response

Communication

Tools

CloudNativePG

Zalando Postgres Operator

ClickHouse Operator

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

• Own the reliability and performance of our production ClickHouse clusters whether self-hosted on Kubernetes or running on managed ClickHouse services
• Design a standard architecture and tooling that let us grow to dozens of multi-node clusters without the operational work growing at the same pace
• Manage the whole cluster lifecycle as code provisioning configuration scaling upgrades and migrations
• Build monitoring and alerting that catch problems before users notice them
• Own backups and disaster recovery and test restores regularly
• Keep clusters secure by default
• Plan capacity and keep infrastructure costs under control
• Be the go-to person on ClickHouse for developers DevOps engineers other DBAs and engineering leadership from schema design and data ingestion to query performance
• Handle routine database requests and automate as many of them as you can
• Step in during rare production emergencies including outside business hours
• Afterwards lead the root-cause analysis on the database side and contribute to the postmortem
• Keep documentation and runbooks up to date and share what you know with the team

What you'll bring

• Deep, DBA-level knowledge of ClickHouse from running it in production. You should understand how it stores, merges, replicates, and queries data, and be able to explain why a cluster behaves the way it does.
• Strong SQL is part of this, including optimising complex analytical queries and reviewing schema design.
• Ability to design architecture and automation that holds up across dozens of multi-node clusters.
• Experience running a large fleet of databases (dozens or hundreds of instances) is a strong advantage, and the engine does not have to be ClickHouse.
• You have run and maintained stateful workloads on Kubernetes in production, well beyond the initial deployment.
• Production use of a Kubernetes operator to run databases. Any engine counts, for example CloudNativePG, Zalando Postgres Operator, Altinity, or the official ClickHouse operator.
• Experience with version upgrades, backup and restore, and migrating large datasets between clusters or regions with zero or minimal downtime.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across the whole stack, from queries and schema design down to Kubernetes, Linux, storage, and networking.
• A proactive approach to database health. You have built monitoring and alerting with any modern observability stack, and you act on early warning signs before they turn into incidents.
• Database security in practice: encryption in transit and at rest, access control, and secrets management.
• Infrastructure as code with any mainstream tool, plus at least one programming or scripting language for automation.
• You have hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure on any major provider, as opposed to only using a platform that another team runs.
• Clear communication, written and spoken, with engineers and with leadership, whether the subject is architecture, performance, an incident, a risk, or a cost. You should be able to take a problem from investigation to production fix on your own.
• Nice to have: Hands-on work on the source code of a Kubernetes operator for databases, as a developer or contributor.
• Practical use of AI tools for database observability or for automating routine operational tasks.
• A background in highly regulated environments.
• Any Kubernetes or cloud certifications.