Principal Database Engineer (ClickHouse)

Location: Hyderabad, India (3 days per week in office)

Role Overview

Nasuni is expanding its data intelligence and governance capabilities following the acquisition of DryvIQ. As we integrate DryvIQ’s technology into the Nasuni platform, we’re looking for a Principal Database Engineer with deep ClickHouse expertise to architect and scale the analytical database infrastructure powering customer reporting and data intelligence.

Our customers rely on flexible, self-service reporting to analyze their data, applying their own filters, groupings, and queries. As data volumes grow from hundreds of millions to billions, and potentially tens of billions, of records, delivering fast, reliable reporting becomes an increasingly complex engineering challenge. We need someone who can design ClickHouse architectures that perform at scale, not simply optimize individual queries.

Our architecture uses PostgreSQL as the transactional system of record, with data replicated into ClickHouse to power customer-facing analytics and reporting. While PostgreSQL is well established, ClickHouse represents our greatest opportunity to improve performance, scalability, and the customer experience. The challenge is designing efficient data models, ingestion pipelines, and query strategies that deliver responsive reporting even as data volumes and query complexity increase.

In this hands-on, design-focused role, you’ll take technical ownership of ClickHouse architecture, data modeling, ingestion, replication, and query performance. You’ll work closely with application, platform, and infrastructure engineers to make critical architectural decisions, solve complex performance challenges, and build a scalable foundation for future growth.

This is not a traditional DBA maintenance role or an application development position.

What you'll do

• Design, implement, and optimize ClickHouse databases supporting billions to tens of billions of rows of analytical data.
• Make architectural decisions involving ClickHouse table engines, MergeTree-family configurations, materialized views, projections, partitioning, sorting keys, and data layout.
• Design efficient schemas for high-dimensional reporting workloads, including exceptionally wide tables approaching 1,000 columns.
• Optimize analytical SQL queries, query execution, and customer-facing reporting performance.
• Engineer and improve data ingestion, replication, and log collection workflows.
• Evaluate tradeoffs among query latency, ingestion throughput, data freshness, storage efficiency, and cost.
• Diagnose bottlenecks across databases, ingestion pipelines, and application-generated SQL.
• Collaborate with application engineers to understand ORM-generated queries and improve database access patterns without requiring application coding.
• Establish performance benchmarks, monitoring, capacity planning, and scale-testing practices.
• Use approved AI-assisted tools for investigation and analysis, validating recommendations for correctness, security, and performance.

What you'll bring

Must-Have Qualifications

• Deep hands-on experience designing, implementing, tuning, and operating ClickHouse in production.
• Strong knowledge of ClickHouse table engines, particularly MergeTree-family engines, materialized views, and projections.
• Demonstrated experience designing analytical databases for billions of rows, with ownership of architectural and performance decisions.
• Advanced SQL, query optimization, execution analysis, and data modeling expertise.
• Experience with large-scale ingestion pipelines, replication architectures, or analytical processing workflows.
• Ability to balance ingestion performance, query responsiveness, freshness, and infrastructure efficiency.
• Experience diagnosing production performance issues and delivering measurable improvements.
• Ability to read application code, understand database access patterns, and collaborate with software engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• PostgreSQL as an OLTP system of record, or comparable Oracle, SQL Server, or other relational OLTP experience.
• Experience with exceptionally wide analytical tables, including hundreds or approximately 1,000 columns.
• Familiarity with ORM frameworks and inefficient application-generated SQL.
• Distributed ClickHouse, replication, sharding, and high-availability configurations.
• Customer-facing SaaS analytics or reporting environments.
• Database observability, performance automation, and capacity modeling.

Nice to have

• Experience scaling databases to hundreds of terabytes or beyond.
• Experience supporting database-intensive SaaS products and C#/.NET application teams.
• Familiarity with Linux and Kubernetes-based production environments.
• Experience with database automation, capacity modeling, and large-scale performance testing.
• ClickHouse certification.

Ideal Candidate

Has personally designed and optimized production ClickHouse environments at multi-billion-row scale, understands analytical architecture tradeoffs, and can demonstrate measurable improvements in query responsiveness. Takes ownership of complex decisions and collaborates across ingestion, database, and application teams.

Experience Guidelines

Typically 9+ years in database engineering, data infrastructure, or related software engineering, including substantial recent hands-on ClickHouse production experience. Direct ClickHouse expertise, architectural ownership, and performance outcomes matter more than an exact number of years or a specific OLTP database.

About Nasuni and Hyderabad

Nasuni is the unstructured data foundation for enterprise teams, and the AI that supports them. We manage, protect, and activate the world's unstructured data so organizations can work smarter, spend wisely, and create safely without limits. As a Vista-backed SaaS data infrastructure company, we're turning massive file stores into secure, actionable data for automation, analytics, and global collaboration.

In Hyderabad, you'll collaborate with global engineering teams on hard problems at the intersection of cloud and enterprise data infrastructure. With Vista Equity Partners' backing, you also get access to a worldwide network of software leaders, cross-portfolio learning, leadership programs, and AI innovation communities.