Manish Gill

So if you have the depth + breadth, DM me.

But that's just an example.

The pattern I've usually seen is that DB developers can have *depth* in one area of expertise (think Storage, Query Processing, Consensus etc).

But for building a prod DB offering, depth isn't enough. You need significant breadth.

Of course, they might know a lot about Cloud Infrastructure -> all the way from AWS primitives down to what the hardware can support.

Then there are outstanding applications - people who've got both the breadth and the depth.

They can:

Start from a log line ->
Think about DB operations in K8s ->
Reason the Kernel's allocation behavior ->
Impact on the DB's own memory allocation ->
Find a fix.

Can't hire a pure Infra person who cannot write code.

Can't hire a pure backend person who doesn't do infra - because usually there is a separate team to manage it for them.

Also can't hire a SQL expert who opens Snowflake and writes queries all day.

Overlap in ^ puts you ahead of the curve

If you're primarily a DevOps Engineer or an SRE, for many CVs, I don't even know if this person can code or not.
Usually, there is nothing in the CV that indicates application / backend development skills.

So can you build production grade systems?

Conversely, if you're a k8s expert, but know nothing about the nuances of what it takes to manage databases, you will have an interesting learning curve ahead.

k8s itself is a vast ecosystem though, so the ability to deep dive into k8s control loops puts you ahead of the curve.

3. Operationally, DBAs != Cloud Native Database Infra Devs. If you are used to database tuning to support production workloads in a few companies, you're off to a great start.

But can I trust you to build similar things on top of k8s?

2. User != Operator != Developer, but the lines do get blurred.

The best DB developer I know is also the best user of said DB.

Operators don't have to be expert devs, but must be willing to get their hands dirty.

Since I spent the entire first half of the day going over at least a 150+ CVs, I'll just mention a few Dos and Don't.

These aren't cardinal rules (I also make mistakes). But here we go:

1. Proof of work. Done similar work? I'll likely trust you to ramp up quickly

This is still a thing. I'm hiring 2 engineers. DM me or Email your CV at manish.gill [at] clickhouse [dot] com.

YouTube video by CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] Dancing With the Pods: Live Migration of a Database Fleet While Serving... Jayme Bird & Manish Gill

My London #KubeCon / #CloudNativeCon 2025 talk is now up! Check it out here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufY_...

Are there Senior/Staff+ Engineers on my timeline who want to work on the intersection of #Databases, #Caches, #Infra, Kubernetes/Operators and #Scaling #Algorithms (think time series, predictive scaling etc)?

If so, please drop me a DM. Our small but mighty team at ClickHouse is growing!

In #London this week to attend KubeCon. My colleague Jayme Bird and I will be doing a talk about a year long dtatefulset orchestration migration in ClickHouse cloud.

Do attend the talk if you are interested in operators, durable execution or databases.

#KubeCon #CloudNativeCon #Kubecon2025

Congrats!

Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability need to be resolved. In addition, there...

Chapters 1–7 of the second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications are now available in early release (sorry, O'Reilly subscribers only at this point). Among other changes, you may notice that we now talk about “sharding” rather than “partitioning” www.oreilly.com/library/view...

Learning German is more difficult than learning C++.

www.foundationdb.org/files/fdb-pa...

Reading the FoundationDB Paper today at the work #papers group. Such a great read.

Whoever said Go is a minimal language is a liar.

First NYC Systems talks of 2025 tonight! See you there!

Cheers

TBH as much as I love some of them, many cppcon talks are quite boring.

What resources would you recommend to learn C++ in 2025?

Berlin Systems Group berlinsystems.xyz will host our 5th meetup this evening. Come Join us to talk about Apache Iceberg and LLVM.

If you are into Compilers, Distributed Systems, Databases, Formal Verifications, Programming Languages etc, this is the place for you.

Berlin Systems Group · Luma Meetup (February 5th) Our latest meetup for all low level systems enthusiasts in Berlin. If you’re interested in how Databases, Distributed Systems and…

Berlin Systems Group is back with its 5th edition!

Happening Feb 5th - we will have 2 talks: on Apache Iceberg and LLVM.

Register here: lu.ma/7gzae6az

Billion Row Challenge for JSON? Yes Please jsonbench.com

I never know anyone at these events.

Thanks!

Super excited to announce that my talk "Dancing with the Pods: Live migration of a database fleet while serving millions of queries" was accepted for KubeCon 2025 London.

#kubecon #kubernetes #clickhouse