Kaushik Iska is an engineering leader building databases.
I lead Postgres engineering at ClickHouse, where we're building Postgres managed by ClickHouse: one stack for transactions and analytics.
Previously, I co-founded PeerDB (YC S23) to make Postgres replication fast and simple. ClickHouse acquired it in 2024.
Before that, I worked on Flutter and Fuchsia at Google, and backend systems at Palantir.
I write here about Postgres, databases, and systems, plus the occasional graphics experiment.
Work
ClickHouse
Director of Engineering
2024 – Now
PeerDB
CTO and Co-founder
2023 – 2024
Google
Senior Software Engineer
2019 – 2023
SafeGraph
Senior Software Engineer
2017 – 2019
Palantir
Software Engineer
2013 – 2017
Writing
Why Every PeerDB Cloud Tenant Still Gets a Private Postgres
Why PeerDB Cloud gives every tenant its own logical Postgres database for its catalog, and why the “boring” choice lets us move faster.
2025
Shader Playground
Recreating the sunset from Turner's The Fighting Temeraire with fragment shaders, one gradient at a time.
2020
Fitness and Freshness
A look at the fitness and freshness metrics of Strava.
2019
Scanline Racer
Speeding up rendering by racing the scanline.
2019
Proving Order Axioms for Dedekind Cuts
Constructing the reals with Dedekind cuts, and proving the transitivity order axiom that Zorich's Mathematical Analysis I leaves as an exercise.
2019
Navier-Stokes equation for dummies
A gentle walk through what the Navier-Stokes equation says about how fluids move, from a conversation at an airport gate.
2018
Elsewhere
What is direct I/O, and why does ClickHouse Managed Postgres use it for backups?
ClickHouse
Oct 2026
Postgres on NVMe: performance and the convergence of transactions and analytics
ClickHouse
Sep 2026
What else runs on your Postgres server, and how do we stop it from taking the database down?
ClickHouse
Aug 2026
Postgres FDW: Pushdown is a negotiation
ClickHouse
Aug 2026
Why strict memory overcommit matters for Postgres
ClickHouse
Aug 2026
Projects
Omarchy Logitech battery
An Omarchy bar widget and TUI for native Logitech Bolt battery monitoring.
rust
pg_stat_ch
A PostgreSQL extension that exports every query metric to ClickHouse.
c
PostgreSQL mailing list downloader
Tools to download, archive, and analyze the PostgreSQL mailing lists in a structured format.
python
mcp-clickhouse
The Model Context Protocol server that connects ClickHouse to AI assistants.
python
PeerDB
Fast, simple, cost-effective replication from Postgres to data warehouses, queues, and storage.
go
Frame Jank Visualizer
Drop in a Flutter frame's raster stats to see which layers made it slow.
web