Senior Software Engineer - JVM Language Clients

ClickHouse

13h • Remote

About The Position

Recognized on the 2025 Forbes Cloud 100 list, ClickHouse is one of the most innovative and fast-growing private cloud companies with over 3,000 customers and ARR that has grown over 250 percent year over year. ClickHouse leads the market in real-time analytics, data warehousing, observability, and AI workloads. The company recently secured a $400M Series D financing round and serves customers like Capital One, Meta, Cursor, Sony, and Tesla. The mission is to transform how companies use data. The Integrations Ecosystem org builds and maintains connections between ClickHouse and the rest of the data world, including low-level database drivers, ingestion and CDC pipelines, data framework integrations, and BI connectivity. This role is on the Language Clients team, which provides the JVM foundation for the ecosystem. As a Senior Software Engineer on Language Clients, you will be a technical owner of ClickHouse's Java client and JDBC driver, which are foundational for the Connectors team and external frameworks. Your primary users are engineers, and your job is to ensure they have a fast, reliable, and well-designed foundation, using their feedback to guide future driver development.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a significant portion focused on data-intensive systems: drivers, SDKs, ingestion, CDC, streaming, or analytics.
• Deep Java and JVM expertise: memory model, GC tuning, profiling, and the ability to reason about throughput and latency at the level of bytes on the wire.
• Hands-on experience building or substantially extending a library that other engineers depend on. You understand that API design compounds, and that a breaking change in a widely used library is a very different thing from a breaking change in an application.
• Strong grasp of database fundamentals: SQL, query execution, and analytical/OLAP workloads. Judgment about when to lean on framework abstractions versus when to drop down to the protocol.
• Solid instincts on concurrency in the JVM: executors, reactive streams, backpressure, connection pooling, and the failure modes that come with each.
• Thoughtful, transparent use of modern AI development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or equivalents) combined with strong independent design and code review judgment. We expect engineers to lean on AI where it's genuinely helpful and to be explicit about where they didn't. Resistance to AI tooling is a mismatch for this team and so is over-reliance without the underlying engineering depth to review what comes out.
• Excellent written communication. Most of our coordination happens in design docs, PR descriptions, and RFCs.
• Genuine open-source disposition: comfort engaging with community issues, external contributors, and public design discussions. You don't need to be a maintainer of a well-known project, but you do need to be comfortable working in the open.

Nice To Haves

• Working knowledge of JDBC internals, ADBC, or Arrow / Arrow Flight SQL.
• Experience designing or evolving wire protocols, or contributing to a widely-used network client.
• Prior contributions to open-source data infrastructure (Kafka, Spark, Flink, dbt, Debezium, Iceberg, or similar).
• Working knowledge of ClickHouse or another columnar/OLAP engine.

Responsibilities

• Own the Java client and JDBC driver end-to-end: roadmap, API design, performance, release engineering, and partner-facing support.
• Drive throughput and latency work across the client and ClickHouse server
• Partner day-to-day with the Connectors team as an embedded internal customer: understand what their connectors need from the driver, and ship it.
• Engage directly with external partners across data ingestion, and data visualization on interoperability, regressions, and roadmap alignment.
• Ship visible, measurable wins in throughput, stability, and developer experience.
• Bring opinions, artifacts, and written proposals to shape where we invest next.

Benefits

• Flexible work environment - ClickHouse is a globally distributed company and remote-friendly. We currently operate in over 20 countries.
• Healthcare - Employer contributions towards your healthcare.
• Equity in the company - Every new team member who joins our company receives stock options.
• Time off - Flexible time off in the US, generous entitlement in other countries.
• A $500 Home office setup if you’re a remote employee.
• Global Gatherings – We believe in the power of in-person connection and offer opportunities to engage with colleagues at company-wide offsites.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 101-250 employees