Clickhouse Database Administrator (DBA)

Altenar is an international IT company founded in 2011, with offices in Malta, Greece, Georgia, the Isle of Man, and Uruguay. We specialize in high-load software development and provide one of the best technology solutions for the iGaming industry worldwide.

Altenar is interested in recruiting the services of a ClickHouse Database Administrator (DBA) to work closely within the Technology team, focusing on the deployment, configuration, performance and ongoing maintenance of multiple ClickHouse clusters, which underpin the Altenar Intelligence Platform. The incumbent will be responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability and efficiency of our analytical databases and will actively participate in the architectural roadmap of our data platform.

The incumbent shall be experienced in operating ClickHouse in production, including schema design and evolution, query optimization, cluster configuration, replication and backup strategies. They shall have the systems engineering background and be comfortable with Linux, network protocols and server administration to take ownership of the associated infrastructure. The incumbent shall also have experience in the management of compute/storage clusters as deployed for the purposes of data warehousing / data marts and data lakes.

The role works closely with the Data Engineer/Data Analyst roles at Altenar as well as with the development teams. The incumbent will contribute to system and software architecture decisions on a continuous basis across Altenar products that interface with ClickHouse and the Altenar Intelligence Platform. The incumbent will also work closely with the Infrastructure and Environments teams.

The incumbent will require strong communication and collaboration skills and the motivation to achieve results in a dynamic business environment.

Responsibilities:

The activities of a ClickHouse Database Administrator include but are not limited to:

• 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. 

Experience/Skills Required:

• 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.

What we are responsible for:

• 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.