Senior Backend Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own and scale the infrastructure behind one of the most widely adopted open-source LLM engineering platforms in the world — processing terabytes of AI tracing data per day for thousands of AI teams, including a significant portion of the Fortune 50.

We're a small, engineering-heavy team building what many consider the "Datadog" of LLM observability. We sit at the intersection of open source, high-throughput data infrastructure, and applied AI — and we're now part of a leading columnar database company, which means the engineers who built the database you'll be optimizing are a Slack message away.

This is a hybrid role based in EU timezones, with approximately one week per month in our Berlin office. You can be based anywhere in the EU. Visa sponsorship is not available — you must be legally authorized to work in the EU.

What You'll Do

• Own and optimize the ingestion pipeline: Work on throughput, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency across a high-volume data pipeline that flows from our API through to a ClickHouse-backed analytics store.

• Make ClickHouse sing: Design and evolve schemas, write and tune complex analytical queries, and partner with ClickHouse engineers to push the limits of what's possible at petabyte scale.

• Build backend abstractions: Create reusable, well-documented building blocks so that product engineers can ship data-heavy features without reinventing infrastructure each time.

• Operate production systems: Run and improve cloud deployments across multiple production environments — handling capacity planning, incident response, and monitoring with SRE discipline.

• Make self-hosting effortless: Maintain and improve deployment tooling from a single Docker Compose setup all the way to enterprise-grade Helm chart deployments on Kubernetes.

• Contribute to open source: Everything you ship is public and immediately used by developers worldwide — participate in PR reviews, issue triage, and community engagement.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• Based in the EU and able to work EU timezones; willing to be in Berlin approximately one week per month

• Legally authorized to work in the EU without company visa sponsorship

• Hands-on experience with ClickHouse or other columnar/analytical databases — schema design, query optimization, and managing 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 services with Docker and Kubernetes, and applying SRE practices such as capacity planning, incident response, and monitoring

• Proven ability to take end-to-end ownership of backend/platform components and work autonomously in a small, fast-moving engineering team

• 3+ years of backend or full-stack engineering experience

Nice to Have:

• Experience contributing to or maintaining open-source projects — including PR reviews, issue triage, and community workflows

• Background at companies working in AI/ML tooling, data infrastructure, or observability

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: €90,000 – €160,000 per year, depending on experience

• Meaningful equity in a well-backed, high-growth company (previously Series A/B stage investors; now part of a larger technology organization)

• Small team = large scope and direct impact on product and architecture

• Work with — and get direct access to — world-class database engineers at the infrastructure layer you depend on daily

• Flexible remote-first culture with regular in-person time in Berlin

Location

This role is open to candidates across the EU working in EU timezones. The team meets in person in Berlin, Germany approximately one week per month. Fully remote otherwise. Visa sponsorship is not available.

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