What are we looking for?

We are looking for someone who wants to contribute to Open Source as a full time job. In particular, someone that wants to contribute to ClickHouse, the database that runs under the Tinybird covers.

Things are changing rapidly in the Open Source world: popular companies are changing the licenses of their OS products trying to prevent bigger players from monopolizing the market they created. But we still firmly believe in Open Source as a force for good: how couldn’t we? We have built our professional lives on top of it.

So we want to contribute to making ClickHouse better: to serve our needs, of course, but also to give back to the community and to ensure that it remains the fastest database out there for years to come.

If you are the ideal candidate, it probably means that one of the below is true:

• you have C++ experience and you are already working with/contributing to ClickHouse, or
• you have C++ experience in other type of products, but you are keen to become a ClickHouse internals expert
• you are an experienced programmer (in C++ or other) and have a deep understanding of how databases work internally.
  

However, if none of the above is true for you but you still think you are right for this, feel free to apply and let us know why.

Some other things that are important to us:

• You are fluent in English. If you speak Spanish, Russian or Chinese also, that would be amazing and it would make us all wonder what have we done with our lives.
• You communicate well in writing. Not only because we favor asynchronous work, also because you will have to write documentation and guides and the occasional blog post.
• Ideally you are located somewhere in Europe, or at least, not too many time-zones away. This is not essential but would certainly make it easier as, for now, our team is entirely in the CET timezone.

How would your day look like

In this company, everyone is part of the product team. While your focus will be on ClickHouse, the priorities of what you tackle will be most of the time driven by the things we want to accomplish with the product.

For instance, you might need to prioritize solving Clickhouse bugs that may be causing our customers’ grief. Other times you will be developing new Clickhouse features. And oftentimes you will be helping someone on the team figure out what is the best way to solve a problem with ClickHouse. For example, there are multiple examples of public contributions we have done in the past, such as:

• Fixing the argument priority on lambda functions.
• Many performance improvements.
• Multiple Pull Requests to improve how ClickHouse handles query limits and KILL requests (#2667, #31636, and #32271).
  

We use Basecamp and slack for daily coordination and planning, GitLab for issue tracking and milestones and Google Docs to discuss things like product decisions. There is always something to read and discuss or to contribute to.

We discuss the product pretty much every day. It needs to be a balance between today and tomorrow's problems so the vision of someone that is working with the product to fix real problems is crucial, but the outlook of someone that knows the internals (your case) is invaluable to making the right long term decisions.

Our product design approach is to work backwards: someone proposes a solution to a problem, explains why it's important, describes how it would work and writes (but doesn’t yet publish) the announcement blog post. Then, everyone else reads it, asks questions and we decide if that makes sense or not. You'll be part of this, of course. Often time we build what we call an MSP (“Minimum Shitty Prototype”) that enables us to see very roughly how it would work and to understand the real effort involved in actually shipping it.

Some bits about the way we work

• We are a fully remote company, and not just because of COVID19. All of our previous companies were remote friendly companies.
• We give you up to 2400€ to get the right setup at home if you need it.
• We are just starting up so your work will impact everything we do. We also believe in full transparency and you will always know what is going on.
  

Here you have our company principles.

Compensation

• A competitive package, including Stock Options.
• Up to 85k depending on experience.
• 22 days of holiday a year (plus your birthday and public holidays), but... who's counting?
• Freedom to work from wherever suits you best. Ideally based in Europe.

How to apply

First, check out this ClickHouse bug. If this is something you would feel comfortable solving (or at least, trying to solve), you should by all means apply. Give it a go! Then apply below and tell us a bit about yourself, how you would tackle (or have tackled) the issue and ask us whatever you need to know about the problem we are trying to solve, the company, your role, etc...