(Senior) Backend Engineer (IAM and Billing)
ClickHouse
Software Engineering
Berlin, Germany · Munich, Germany
EUR 90k-160k / year + Equity
Location
Europe; Berlin; London; Munich; Paris; Zurich
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
Hybrid
Department
Engineering
Compensation
- Salary €90K – €160K • Offers Equity
About Langfuse
Open Source LLM Engineering Platform that helps teams build useful AI applications via tracing, evaluation, and prompt management (mission, product). We are now part of ClickHouse.
We're building the "Datadog" of this category; model capabilities continue to improve, but building useful applications is really hard, both in startups and enterprises.
Largest open source solution in this category: trusted by 19 of the Fortune 50, >2k customers, >26M monthly SDK downloads, >6M Docker pulls.
We joined ClickHouse in January 2026 because LLM observability is fundamentally a data problem and Langfuse already ran on ClickHouse. Together we can move faster on product while staying true to open source and self-hosting, and join forces on GTM and sales to accelerate revenue.
Previously backed by Y Combinator, Lightspeed, and General Catalyst.
We're a small, engineering-heavy, and experienced team in Berlin and San Francisco. We are also hiring for engineering in EU timezones and expect one week per month in our Berlin office (how we work).
Why IAM & Billing at Langfuse
Your work will be the foundation everything else is built on.
Every API call, every dashboard load, every team invitation, every usage-based invoice — they all flow through the systems you'll own. Authentication, authorization, and billing aren't features at Langfuse; they're the shared platform that every product team depends on.
This is a role with unusual scope. You'll design the identity and access model that lets Fortune 50 companies manage hundreds of users across projects and environments with fine-grained permissions. You'll build the billing infrastructure that translates billions of trace events into accurate, real-time usage metering and invoicing. And you'll do it all in a way that works seamlessly for both Langfuse Cloud and self-hosted deployments.
The stakes are high — get auth wrong and nothing works; get billing wrong and the business doesn't work — but that's exactly what makes this role rewarding. You'll own critical shared components end to end, from design through production.
Langfuse is now part of ClickHouse, and you'll be building platform infrastructure alongside a world-class team. Few backend roles offer this combination: mission-critical scope, open source visibility, and direct impact on how thousands of companies adopt and pay for AI tooling.
You will grow at Langfuse by
Own authentication and identity: You'll build and evolve how users and API keys authenticate with Langfuse — supporting SSO/SAML, OAuth, API key management, and session handling. You'll make sure auth is secure, fast, and frictionless for teams of every size.
Design fine-grained authorization: You'll architect the permission model that lets enterprises manage complex organizational structures — projects, roles, and scoped access controls. You'll build the RBAC (and eventually ABAC) layer that product engineers rely on when shipping every new feature.
Build usage-based billing infrastructure: Langfuse bills based on trace volume. You'll own the metering pipeline that counts events accurately at massive scale, integrates with payment providers, and generates invoices that customers trust. You'll handle plan management, entitlements, and the self-serve upgrade flows.
Create shared platform APIs: Auth and billing touch every surface of the product. You'll design clean, well-documented internal APIs and abstractions that let product engineers move fast without worrying about permission checks or billing edge cases.
Support self-hosted flexibility: Many teams run Langfuse on their own infrastructure with their own identity providers. You'll make sure our auth layer integrates cleanly with enterprise identity stacks (LDAP, OIDC, SAML).
Scale for enterprise adoption: As more large organizations adopt Langfuse, the demands on IAM and billing grow fast — audit logging, compliance requirements, multi-tenant isolation, complex pricing models. You'll be building ahead of that curve.
What we're looking for
Strong backend engineer who gets excited about designing secure, reliable platform systems that other engineers build on top of
Experience building authentication and authorization systems — SSO/SAML, OAuth, RBAC, API key management
Familiarity with billing or payments infrastructure — usage-based metering, payment provider integrations (Stripe or similar), entitlements
You think carefully about security, edge cases, and failure modes — especially in multi-tenant environments
You organize yourself. You have strong opinions about API design, system boundaries, and how to ship shared infrastructure safely
Comfortable reading and writing TypeScript (our backend) and SQL
Interest in open source software and empathy for self-hosted operators who need to integrate with their own identity stacks
Thrives in a small, accountable team where your output is visible and matters
CS or quantitative degree preferred
Bonus points:
Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms with enterprise identity requirements
Background in usage-based billing systems or fintech infrastructure
Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOC 2, GDPR) as they relate to auth and data access
Former founder
Process
We can run the full process to your offer letter in less than 7 days (hiring process).
Tech Stack
We run a TypeScript monorepo: Next.js on the frontend, Express workers for background jobs, PostgreSQL for transactional data, ClickHouse for tracing at scale, S3 for file storage, and Redis for queues and caching. You should be familiar with a good chunk of this, but we trust you'll pick up the rest quickly (Stack, Architecture).
How we ship
We trust you to take ownership (ownership overview) for your area. You identify what to build, propose solutions (RFCs), and ship them. Everyone here thinks about the user experience and the technical implementation at the same time. Everyone manages their own Linear.
You're never alone. Anyone from the team is happy to go into a whiteboard session with you. 15 minutes of shared discussion can very much improve the overall output.
We implement maker schedule and communication. There are two recurring meetings a week: Monday check-in on priorities (15 min) and a demo session on Fridays (60 min).
Code reviews are mentorship. New joiners get all PRs reviewed to learn the codebase, patterns, and how the systems work (onboarding guide).
We use AI as much as possible in our workflows to make our users happy. We encourage everyone to experiment with new tooling and AI workflows.
Why Langfuse (now part of ClickHouse)
This role puts you at the forefront of the AI revolution, partnering with engineering teams who are building the technology that will define the next decade(s).
This is an open-source devtools company. We ship daily, talk to customers constantly, and fight for great DX. Reliability and performance are central requirements.
Your work ships under your name. You'll appear on changelog posts for the features you build, and during launch weeks, you'll produce videos to announce what you've shipped to the community. You’ll own the full delivery end to end.
We're solving hard engineering problems: figuring out which features actually help users improve AI product performance, building SDKs developers love, visualizing data-rich traces, rendering massive LLM prompts and completions efficiently in the UI, and processing terabytes of data per day through our ingestion pipeline.
You'll work closely with the ClickHouse team and learn how they build a world-class infrastructure company. We're in a period of strong growth: Langfuse is growing organically and accelerating through ClickHouse's GTM. (Why we joined ClickHouse)
If you wonder what to build next, our users are a Slack message or a Github discussions post away.
You’re on a continuous learning journey. The AI space develops at breakneck speed and our customers are at the forefront. We need to be ready to meet them where they are and deliver the tools they need just-in-time.
Compensation Range: €90K - €160K