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Jobs · Engineering · California

Sr. Software Engineer, Data Platform, Factory Software

Tesla · Fremont, CA · Today
On-siteEngineering$168k–$252k/yrFull-time

What To Expect

Tesla's Factory Software team builds the systems that keep our factories running — and the data layer underneath all of it is what makes real-time decisions, AI automation, and operational intelligence possible. As we scale software across every gigafactory worldwide, we need a data platform that can keep up: high-throughput ingestion, sub-second analytics, and a foundation that AI agents can actually reason over. That's where you come in. You'll own ClickHouse as a core platform — not as a DBA maintaining a box, but as an engineer building the storage backbone that powers every application, pipeline, and AI agent in our factory software ecosystem. You'll define how data flows in, how it's modeled, how it's queried at scale, and how AI agents consume it to drive autonomous decisions on the factory floor.

What You'll Do

  • Own the design, deployment, and operation of ClickHouse clusters across factory software applications — schema design, table engine selection, partitioning, replication, and retention strategies

  • Build and maintain high-throughput data ingestion pipelines from factory systems, IoT devices, Kafka streams, and operational databases into ClickHouse

  • Define data modeling standards and query patterns that enable consistent, performant access across engineering teams — establish ClickHouse as the source of truth for analytical and operational workloads

  • Design and expose data access layers (APIs, SDKs, materialized views) that AI agents and LLM-based workflows can reliably query and act on

  • Collaborate with application engineers to migrate existing workloads to ClickHouse where appropriate, and advise on storage architecture decisions across MySQL, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB

  • Instrument and own observability for the data platform — query performance, ingestion lag, cluster health, alerting, and capacity planning

  • Deploy and operate data platform services on Kubernetes with full CI/CD ownership and on-call accountability

  • Drive adoption across the engineering org through documentation, internal tooling, design reviews, and hands-on enablement — you're the ClickHouse authority teams reach for, not the IT ticket queue

  • Stay current with the ClickHouse ecosystem as it evolves — evaluate releases and new engine capabilities so our platform tracks upstream best practices

What You'll Bring

  • Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience

  • 5+ years of backend or data engineering experience, with 2+ years of hands-on ClickHouse in production — you've designed schemas, tuned queries, and operated clusters under real load, not just ran tutorials

  • Deep understanding of ClickHouse internals: MergeTree family engines, materialized views, projections, dictionaries, sharding, replication, and query optimization; index-aware table design (ORDER BY, primary key, data-skipping indexes) and tuning; production troubleshooting — diagnosing errors such as excessive parts ("too many parts"), replication lag, and related cluster issues; performance analysis under concurrency and load, not only optimizing isolated queries

  • Strong proficiency in SQL for analytical workloads and at least one systems/backend language — Go, Python, Rust, or C# — for building services and pipelines around the data layer

  • Experience with streaming data ingestion — Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent — and designing low-latency pipelines from event sources into columnar storage

  • Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency trade-offs, fault tolerance, backpressure, and schema evolution under live traffic

  • Experience enabling AI/ML workloads with data infrastructure — building data layers that support RAG pipelines, LLM tool-use, agent memory, or real-time feature serving

  • Experience deploying and operating data services on Kubernetes, with strong observability practices (metrics, tracing, alerting)

  • Ability to work across engineering teams as a platform owner — you write design docs, do code reviews, and raise the floor on data quality for everyone, not just your own services

  • Thrive in a high-autonomy, fast-moving environment where you're expected to define the right solution, not just execute a ticket

Benefits

  • Medical plans > plan options with $0 payroll deduction

  • Fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits

  • Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans, both have options with a $0 paycheck contribution

  • Company Paid (Health Savings Accounts) HSA Contribution when enrolled in the High-Deductible medical plan with HSA

  • Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)

  • 401(k) with employer match, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, and other financial benefits

  • Employee Assistance Program

  • Sick and Vacation time (Flex time for salary positions, Accrued hours for Hourly positions), and Paid Holidays

  • Back-up childcare and parenting support resources

  • Voluntary benefits to include: critical illness, hospital indemnity, accident insurance, theft & legal services, and pet insurance

  • Weight Loss and Tobacco Cessation Programs

  • Tesla Babies program

  • Commuter benefits

  • Employee discounts and perks program

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