Senior Backend Engineer

About the Role

Join a small, engineering-heavy team building the most widely adopted open-source LLM observability and engineering platform — trusted by thousands of AI teams worldwide, including a significant share of the Fortune 50. The platform ingests terabytes of AI tracing data per day and is now part of a leading columnar database company, giving the engineering team direct access to the internals of their core datastore.

This is a high-ownership backend/platform engineering role focused on making the platform fast, reliable, and affordable at massive scale. Everything you ship is open source and immediately visible in production.

What You'll Do

• Own and optimize the ingestion pipeline: Drive throughput, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency across a pipeline that flows from a high-volume API into a ClickHouse-backed data store.
• Master ClickHouse at scale: Design schemas, optimize queries, and tune the analytical data layer so dashboards load instantly over millions of traces — with direct access to the team that built ClickHouse.
• Build reliable backend abstractions: Create reusable platform components that let product engineers ship data-heavy features without reinventing the plumbing each time.
• Operate multi-environment cloud infrastructure: Maintain and improve production environments using SRE practices including capacity planning, incident response, and monitoring.
• Make self-hosting effortless: Support deployment options ranging from a single Docker Compose setup to enterprise-grade Helm chart deployments on Kubernetes.
• Contribute to open source: All work is MIT-licensed and publicly visible — participate in PR reviews, issue triage, and community engagement.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• Legally authorized to work in the EU without visa sponsorship (visa sponsorship is not available)
• Based in the EU / able to work EU timezones; willing to spend approximately one week per month in the Berlin office
• Hands-on experience with ClickHouse or other columnar/analytical databases — schema design, query optimization, large-scale analytical workloads
• Experience designing, building, and operating high-throughput data pipelines (streaming and/or batch) capable of processing terabytes of data per day
• Production experience with observability and distributed tracing systems (metrics, logs, traces) for large-scale, low-latency services
• Experience deploying and operating containerized services with Docker and Kubernetes, applying SRE practices
• Proven ability to take end-to-end ownership of backend/platform components and work autonomously in a small team
• 3+ years of backend or full-stack engineering experience working with large data in production

Nice to Have:

• Experience contributing to open-source projects (git workflows, PR reviews, issue triage)
• Familiarity with LLM observability, OpenTelemetry, or AI/ML application tooling

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary range: €90,000 – €160,000 annually (EUR)
• Equity participation
• Work on a high-visibility open-source project used at enterprise scale
• Direct collaboration with world-class database engineers

Location

This is a hybrid remote role open to candidates across the EU (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, UK, Netherlands, France, Spain, Sweden, Poland, and similar timezones). The team is based primarily in Berlin, with an expectation of approximately one week per month in the Berlin office. Visa sponsorship is not available.