Solution Architect-North Central

Location: Chicago; Minneapolis THE ROLE As an Enterprise Solutions Architect at ClickHouse, you'll own the technical side of the sales cycle for enterprise accounts in the North Central United States. This role serves our Enterprise segment across the North Central region, and the ideal candidate would be based in Minneapolis or Chicago. You'll engage with data platform engineers, architects, SRE, and the VP who owns the standard - and your job is to design something that satisfies all of them and then prove it at production scale. Getting an enterprise team there usually means moving them off something else, so most of your work is making that migration credible: the architecture, benchmarks run against their own data, and a plan their engineers believe they can execute. This is a role for engineers who want the hard version of the problem: real scale, real constraints, and an incumbent to displace. Prior pre-sales experience helps but isn't required - technical depth is non-negotiable. WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING - Own the technical evaluation for enterprise accounts - from discovery through POC or competitive bake-off, architecture sign-off, security review, and first production workload. - Engage across a wider set of stakeholders than a single team: data platform engineers, architects, SRE, security, and the executive who owns the standard. Design solutions that hold up with all of them in the room. - Design for production scale - sizing, sharding and replication strategy, ingestion topology, tiered storage, cost modeling, and what happens when something fails at 3am. - Win competitive displacements against Elasticsearch, Splunk, Snowflake, BigQuery, Druid, Pinot, and homegrown systems, using benchmarks the customer's own team can reproduce. - Own the migration plan - sequencing, dual-run, validation, and cutover - so the customer's team can see exactly how they get to production. - Clear the security and procurement path: questionnaires, compliance artifacts, network and identity architecture, and BYOC or private deployment requirements. - Partner closely with Enterprise AEs to progress and close opportunities - you own the technical win, they own the commercial close. Build the TCO case against the incumbent/competition together. - Advocate for customer needs internally with Product and Engineering - you're the voice of the technical buyer inside ClickHouse. - Contribute reference architectures, benchmark harnesses, migration guides, and objection handling material that help the team scale what's working. WHAT YOU BRING - Deep technical foundation in data infrastructure - built through experience as a data engineer, platform engineer, software engineer, DBA, or solutions architect. - Production experience with analytical databases (ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Druid, Pinot, Vertica) and with operating them, not just querying them. - Distributed systems judgment: partitioning, replication, consistency trade-offs, query execution, and a felt sense for where things break under load. - Fluency across the modern data stack - Kafka and CDC pipelines, orchestration, object storage, BI tools, and at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) at architecture level. - Experience running a technical evaluation against a named competitor and winning it, including designing the migration off the incumbent and the parts of it that are genuinely hard. - Customer-facing experience with real stakes - pre-sales, consulting, technical account management, or a staff-level engineering role that put you in front of customers. - Strong written and verbal communication. You can whiteboard with a staff engineer in the morning and present to a VP of Engineering in the afternoon. - Comfort with longer cycles and more stakeholders. Enterprise evaluations don't close in three weeks, and you know how to keep one moving without letting it stall. - Willingness to say ClickHouse isn't the right tool for a given workload when that's true. PERKS - Flexible work environment - ClickHouse is a globally distributed company and remote-friendly. We currently operate in over 25 countries. - Healthcare - Employer contributions towards your healthcare. - Equity in the company - Every new team member who joins our company receives stock options. - Time off - Flexible time off in the US, generous entitlement in other countries. - A USD$500 Home office setup if you’re a remote employee. - Global Gatherings – We believe in the power of in-person connection and offer opportunities to engage with colleagues at company-wide offsites. CULTURE - WE ALL SHAPE IT As part of a rapidly scaling start-up, you will be instrumental in shaping our culture. Are you interested in finding out more about our culture? Learn more about our values here https://clickhouse.com/company/careers. Check out our blog posts https://clickhouse.com/blog or follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/clickhouseinc/life/0c1ee7f4-2129-488d-b413-e7f6270659fd/?viewAsMember=true to find out more about what’s happening at ClickHouse. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY & PRIVACY ClickHouse provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type based on factors such as race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Please see here https://clickhouse.com/legal/applicant-privacy-notice for our Privacy Statement.