Hybrid Clickhouse Database Administrator, DBA

at Altenar

• Job title: Clickhouse Database Administrator, DBA
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Ansible, BigQuery, Docker, ETL, Grafana, Java, Kafka, Kubernetes, Linux, Prometheus, Python, Shell Scripting, SQL
• Location requirements: Hybrid, St Julians, Malta

About the role

• Clickhouse Database Administrator ensuring reliability and performance of analytical databases. Collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance architecture and data platform strategy.

Responsibilities

• Continuously updating core knowledge and skills in the infrastructure, performance and reliability aspects of ClickHouse and related data warehousing technologies that Altenar harnesses in the operation of its business.
• Working with the Solution Architect and other key Technology team stakeholders on the ongoing architectural development of the Altenar Intelligence Platform, with specific ownership of ClickHouse-related components.
• Design, implement and maintain ClickHouse schemas (tables, partitions, primary keys, indexes, materialized views) to support analytical use cases, reporting and self-service BI.
• Optimise query performance in ClickHouse through schema refinement, appropriate engine selection, partitioning strategies, projections, compression settings and query tuning.
• Work with Data Analysts, Infrastructure Engineers and Data Services Engineers to implement robust, scalable ingestion patterns into ClickHouse (e.g. via streaming, messaging systems and ETL/ELT pipelines) and ensure data quality and consistency.
• Manage ClickHouse clusters including installation, configuration, scaling, and ongoing maintenance (replication, sharding, rolling upgrades, configuration management).
• Manage the capacity planning associated with the Altenar Intelligence Platform’s ClickHouse workloads, including storage growth, CPU/IO utilisation and concurrency.
• Manage the availability and reliability of ClickHouse by developing, monitoring and troubleshooting backup and recovery strategies and high-availability/disaster recovery configurations.
• Implement and maintain monitoring, alerting and performance dashboards for ClickHouse (e.g. integrating with existing observability stacks like Prometheus and Zabbix) and proactively address bottlenecks and incidents.
• Participation in the Architecture Review process to ensure new initiatives or major changes to the Altenar product portfolio have data flow and ClickHouse considerations represented at the inception phase.
• Review query patterns, logs and metrics and provide feedback and best practices to data analysts, developers and other stakeholders.
• Be responsible for data security implementation within ClickHouse, including access control, encryption where applicable, and adherence to internal and regulatory data protection requirements.
• Participation in the research, testing and design of new database-related tools and services (e.g. tooling for schema management, migration, backup, observability) for online or warehoused data.
• Work in a fast-paced, dynamic, multinational, multicultural environment.
• Creating and maintaining documentation for ClickHouse operations, standards and solutions provided.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience administering ClickHouse in production environments, potentially - strong experience with similar columnar/analytical databases (e.g. Vertica, Druid, BigQuery, Snowflake) with a strong interest and willingness to specialise in ClickHouse.
• Strong SQL skills and a solid understanding of columnar storage concepts, data partitioning, compression and indexing strategies.
• Experience with streaming or batch ingestion into analytical databases; familiarity with technologies such as Kafka and distributed logs is considered an advantage.
• Experience with DevOps practices and tools (practical use of Git and Infrastructure-as-Code practices is a must).
• Strong systems background with deep understanding of IO performance and network protocols, particularly in the context of high-throughput analytical workloads.
• Experience with Linux server administration and shell scripting.
• Experience in Docker, Kubernetes and the use of Helm charts is a plus, especially for running ClickHouse in containerised or orchestrated environments.
• Experience with Grafana, Prometheus (or similar monitoring/alerting tools) is a strong plus, particularly for database metrics and observability.
• Experience with Ansible (or similar configuration management tools) is a plus.
• Any knowledge of Python, C# or Java is considered an advantage.
• Strong research and validation skills, with the ability to evaluate and benchmark alternative configurations or tools.
• Prior direct or indirect involvement in data warehouse design, tool selection and support is considered an advantage.
• Strong presentation skills.
• Proficient in spoken and written English.
• Graduate-level education in Computer Science, Engineering or other relevant field.

Benefits

• Providing a fantastic environment to work in
• Supporting your personal and technical development with training opportunities
• Providing career growth in a very interesting company with global customer base
• Providing you with support to ensure you have a good working environment
• Providing guidance and technical direction
• Building a strong Technology Operations team around you to ensure we maintain agility whilst keeping compatible segregation of duties.