Senior Platform Engineer - ClickHouse

Qualys•Foster City, CA

1d•$125,000 - $145,000

About The Position

Qualys is seeking a highly motivated Senior Software Engineer with ClickHouse expertise to work on its next-generation Data Platform and middleware. Working with engineers and architects, this role prototypes, designs, develops, and supports a scalable SaaS cloud security data platform built on microservices. The platform processes more than 100 million transactions and terabytes of data per day, offering opportunities to work with open-source technologies on challenging, business-impacting projects. The engineer will own data technologies and services handling high transaction volumes and scaling to hundreds of terabytes. The role includes providing data-platform-as-a-service capabilities to Qualys applications, advocating for the technology stack, instrumenting day-one and day-two operations, supporting migrations and cloud scaling with minimal downtime, and delivering resilient client SDKs. The position also involves evaluating alternatives to improve scalability, availability, and cost effectiveness. The base salary range is $125,000–$145,000 per year. Final compensation depends on factors such as skills, relevant experience, and work location; the stated range excludes incentive compensation and potential equity grants. Qualys offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits package.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Applied Math, or a related field.
Expertise in ClickHouse, including the capabilities described in the responsibilities.
At least 5 years of hands-on experience developing SaaS software products and solutions for service-oriented deployments in public or private clouds.
Proven data-driven critical-thinking and problem-solving expertise.
Ability to debug systems involving software and people.
Ability to write high-quality, production-ready code that is readable, well-tested, and supported by well-designed APIs.
Passion for innovation and ability to work within agile software development methodologies.
Experience with infrastructure orchestration and automation tools such as Terraform.
Hands-on experience using CI/CD pipelines.
Strong analytical and debugging skills.
Java programming skills, including object-oriented design, prototyping, development, testing, and profiling.
Knowledge of JVM concepts such as garbage collection, heap, stack, profiling, and class loading.
Strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms.
Ability to clearly articulate and communicate technical concepts within and across teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with distributed systems such as Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Ceph, Flink, or Spark.
Experience applying data encryption and data security standards.
Experience with containers and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Experience with monitoring tools such as Graphite, Grafana, and Prometheus.
Experience with HashiCorp technologies such as Consul, Vault, Terraform, and Vagrant.
Experience with configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, or Ansible.
In-depth experience with continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines.
Exposure to Maven, Ant, or Gradle for builds.

Responsibilities

Apply deep expertise in ClickHouse internals and architecture, including engines, partitioning, ordering keys, indexing, and query execution.
Design and review schemas for real-world read/write patterns, optimizing ingestion, query performance, and storage efficiency.
Operate ClickHouse at scale on premises or in the cloud, including replication, sharding, workload management, performance tuning, and production troubleshooting.
Plan capacity across CPU, memory, storage I/O, and network resources, accounting for workload growth, concurrency, background merges, and reliability requirements.
Engineer services for data systems handling millions of transactions per second and scaling to hundreds of terabytes.
Drive data sources and provide data-platform-as-a-service capabilities to Qualys applications.
Advocate for the owned technology stack and contribute enhancements to the open-source community when needed for the Qualys ecosystem.
Instrument day-one and day-two operations for high-volume data technologies.
Migrate, burst into the cloud, and scale the stack with zero or minimal downtime.
Deliver resilient client SDKs that allow applications to communicate with the data source.
Evaluate alternative solutions to address scalability, availability, and cost effectiveness.