In this blog post, we want to recognise the talented women who joined ClickHouse in the very early days and helped shape the company in its infancy. It goes without saying that our company is being built by people of all genders – but the reason why we are focusing on women in a series of posts this March 2023, is because we know that women in leadership positions are still rare in our industry and we want this to change.  We believe that sharing the stories of successful women may help and inspire other  women consider a career with us, or consider a career in the tech industry. In any case, we’re delighted to have contributed to this important change.

## ClickHouse employee #1 ♥️

Before ClickHouse was even incorporated as a company, Dorota Szeremeta, VP of Operations, was already working tirelessly to create the structure, processes and operations required to bring the business to life. Setting up a company from scratch is no small feat. But doing it knowing that it needs to be global from the get-go, with 2 legal entities, an ambitious hiring plan and without any team to start with? Now, that takes a very special kind of courage! This is why we are starting our blog post with the introduction of special ClickHouse employee #1, Dorota Szeremeta.

![dorota-images.png](/uploads/dorota_images_83b97477aa.png)

## Relentless optimism and problem-solving in the face of challenges

Working at a startup in the early days is tough. Very tough. Many challenges are complex to solve. Resources are limited. There is never enough time to do everything. The pressure is on. Success is not guaranteed. It’s only natural and human to become overwhelmed in the face of such challenges. Sometimes, you hear experienced startup’ers refer to this feeling as “falling into the pit of despair”- which many can find relateable! Dorota is a leader who simply won’t let you get down the path. Her energy, optimism and problem-solving are second to none.

Lauren Ausmus, Finance Director: _“One of the things I like best about Dorota is her positivity and optimism that everything has a solution, and she always has faith in her team and others that we will find it. She’s a great sounding board, a great brainstormer, who knows the strengths of the people on her team well enough to come up with the best strategy.”_

As VP of Operations, Dorota will often describe her team as the “central nervous system” of the company and this analogy is really spot on. Under Dorota’s leadership, important items are identified and coordinated, systems and workflows are thought about and effort is being put into ensuring things run smoothly in a way that suits each stage of the company. The positive impact of this work is felt by every single team across the organization and it is hugely appreciated.

## Unstoppable energy is about to join forces with ClickHouse

Fast-forward 3 months, which brings us to October 2021, and Anne Krechmer joins the team as the first and only recruiter at ClickHouse. From the get go, Anne is tasked with hiring top engineering talent to help build the Cloud product, as well as hiring in other functions to help shape the company at this crucial stage. The team is immediately positively impacted by Anne, whose smart and approachable style is appreciated by candidates and hiring managers alike. Quick-witted and with boundless energy, “Firecracker” is a term that’s often top of mind with Anne! But above all else, Anne is an incredibly talented professional who has helped hire some of the most amazing talent in our industry, as well as setting up processes from scratch for the People team.

![anne-dorota.png](/uploads/anne_dorota_bed4a72212.png)

Roopa Tangirala, Senior Director of Engineering: _“Anne has been a great partner and leader in recruiting. Since I joined last year Oct 2021 as the first cloud hire, Anne has been instrumental in helping hire the data plane team taking us from 0 to 15+ and growing. She is an absolutely great recruiting partner to work with for any hiring manager and does an exceptional job in not only recognizing talent, but also ensuring the interview process is well laid out and making sure the candidate experience is high standard. We have been able to hire top talent in Dataplane and bring a product to market in record time due to the hard efforts Anne has spent hiring for the Dataplane team!”_

## Wearing different hats and contributing in multiple areas? Yep, on it.

Soon after Anne Krechmer joined ClickHouse, another instrumental team member started at the company: Claire Lucas. With a background in operations for support services and consulting, Claire joined the operations team and started building processes across multiple systems and functions. Most of us join a startup knowing that we will need to work in multiple areas, but few of us do it with as much flexibility and dexterity as Claire. Something needs creating/fixing/updating? It’s not obvious where it sits? Claire’s on it and it’s in great hands! As a result, Claire has impacted the company positively in a number of functions and been a “go to” person for many team members during events or other key moments for the company. Her flexibility and drive are much appreciated by colleagues across the board.

![claire.png](/uploads/claire_eb8b39daba.png)

Another big shout-out we’d like to give is to our very own Shavoyne McCowan, who joined ClickHouse in October 2021 as well and has provided very responsive, effective and helpful Executive Assistant support to our CEO and President, Product/Engineering but also some other important help within the operations team. Shavoyne is very versatile, super helpful, responsive and her support is invaluable to many of us.

![shavoyne.png](/uploads/shavoyne_e2fc8d974f.png)

## Running finance day to day, with professionalism and a sense of humor

And this blog post would not be complete without the mention of Lauren Ausmus, our Director of Finance. Lauren joined ClickHouse as the only Finance team member and has been working relentlessly to analyse key data, ensure our Finance operations run smoothly and advise our leadership team. AP, FP&A, you name it, Lauren has done it and all with a great attitude, bags of flexibility, impressive professionalism and a sense of humor. Plus _lots_ of hard work- which we do not take for granted.

![lauren.png](/uploads/lauren_7108cc7ffc.png)

Interested in finding out more about ClickHouse? [We’re hiring!](/company/careers)

In this blog post, we want to recognise the talented women who joined ClickHouse in the very early days and helped shape the company in its infancy.

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Women Who Inspire Us: The Women Building ClickHouse

![international-womens-day-2023.png](/uploads/international_womens_day_2023_b5ccc6e482.png)

International Women's Day presents an opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate the countless professional women who are shaping the world in diverse fields, ranging from executives and entrepreneurs to scientists and activists. This day offers a chance to reflect on the progress that has been made towards gender parity, and the work that still remains to be done. It is also about honoring the inspiring women who are breaking barriers and making a difference in their respective industries.

This year at ClickHouse, as we mark International Women's Day, we have decided to celebrate the inspirational women in our lives. We urge our teams to take a moment to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of women whether they are colleagues, friends, or family members. Because in a society where gender bias, unfortunately, still exists, it is so important to express our appreciation and gratitude for all the remarkable women around us. By doing this, together, it allows women to be recognised for their talents, which helps us all foster a culture free from gender bias.

At ClickHouse, there were too many outstanding women to list in one blog post only; therefore, we have decided to launch a series of posts for International Women’s Day, over the next 4 weeks.

In today’s post, we wish to recognise and celebrate the contributions of talented women in our open-source ClickHouse community, as well as in our software development teams and on our board.

Let’s start by celebrating the women who contribute to our ClickHouse open-source community.

## He Wen Ting

![He-Wen-Ting.png](/uploads/He_Wen_Ting_7a3452740f.png)

_“He Wen Ting is an active open-source community contributor to ClickHouse. Her additions to the technology are being used by the team on a daily basis.”_

We are very grateful to our amazing community, which has grown to over 27,000 star gazers on GitHub, and to countless others who use ClickHouse technology to run their businesses in various use cases. To date, we have over 1,192 contributors, and we recognize that ClickHouse would not be the same without the valuable input of our community. We are grateful for their continued support.

While all of our contributors make an impact daily, we would like to thank and highlight He Wen Ting for her work with ClickHouse. He Wen Ting was introduced to ClickHouse by another contributor and her friend, Amos Bird. She began using ClickHouse in her projects and work on big data analysis. Her contribution of [Map Data Type](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/15806) helps ClickHouse store unstructured data, such as metric labels, in a ClickHouse table and her other add of [LineAsString](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/13846) format is used by our CTO, Alexey Milovidov, daily. In the future, He Wen Ting would like to see excellent parallel execution of multiple queries in ClickHouse, and we eagerly await her new adds and feedback! 

## Celebrating our team members

Our team of dedicated employees consistently engages with our community, collaborating to improve our product and enhance the user experience. We are proud to highlight the contributions of two of our talented engineers, Kseniia and Smita, who have recently introduced some exciting and highly useful features to ClickHouse.

### Kseniia Sumarokova

![Kseniia-S.png](/uploads/Kseniia_S_1877f95959.png)

Kseniia is a leading ClickHouse developer and has been working with our core ClickHouse team when ClickHouse was only an open-source project and before it was incorporated into a company. Some of her contributions include: [filesystem cache to speed up operation on object storages](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/33717); [prefetching with asynchronous reading from object storages](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/46168); [streaming replication from PostgreSQL](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/20470); - not to mention merging and reviewing many ClickHouse integrations, including support for data lakes.

### Smita Kulkarni

![Smita-Photo.png](/uploads/Smita_Photo_c9cdbfacad.png)

Smita joined our Core team and has already made such an impact! Smita helped create [compressed marks and primary key](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/43288), [recursive reading from directories with ** glob](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/42376); and [parameterized views as table functions](https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/41687).

We are continually impressed by their professionalism, attention to detail, and collaborative spirit. We are excited to continue building on the momentum generated by their achievements, and we look forward to delivering even more cutting-edge features and capabilities in the future. Together, we will continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with ClickHouse and elevate the standard for data management and analysis.

### Roopa Tangirala

![Roopa (1).png](/uploads/Roopa_1_d7076ba2f1.png)

When it comes to our cloud product, it would not be where it is today (or even exist!) without the hard work of our Cloud team, led by our own Roopa Tangirala. 

Michael Lex was our very first joiner to our Cloud team. Michael recently changed roles from Cloud Engineer to Engineering Manager. He joined Roopa in her vision to help make ClickHouse Cloud a reality. Per Michael “As a captain would their ship, Roopa navigated our team through storms and calms. Roopa was (and is) leading the communication with other teams and stakeholders from ClickHouse Open Source to marketing. She truly is the glue holding the team together. Not only did she grow our team of 2 at that time to over twenty, she still lends an ear to every single individual. She inspires and motivates, and truly identifies what everyone on her team is passionate about. She helped our team find its place within the larger organization and we are all grateful and fortunate to have Roopa and her leadership.”

### Caryn Marooney

![Caryn-Headshot.png](/uploads/Caryn_Headshot_ba67d4802c.png)

Finally, we want to acknowledge the contribution of one of our board members and another inspiring woman: Caryn Marooney. Getting ClickHouse off the ground was not an easy feat. Twenty years ago our CEO Aaron Katz was introduced to Caryn Marooney by Marc Benioff to discuss how cloud computing was going to change enterprise software fundamentally.  Two decades later, they continue to seek each other's counsel on how disruptive technologies like ClickHouse Cloud can provide any company with a competitive advantage. ClickHouse and Aaron are deeply grateful for Caryn's extensive experience and guidance as one of the most storied marketing and communications leaders in our industry.

International Women's Day presents an opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate the countless professional women who are shaping the world in diverse fields, ranging from executives and entrepreneurs to scientists and activists.

ClickHouse People Team

Blog posts by ClickHouse People Team

Women Who Inspire Us: The Women Building ClickHouse

Women Who Inspire Us: The Women Pioneers in ClickHouse Community and Company