ClickHouse hires Carnegie Mellon researcher Andy Pavlo to lead new ClickHouse Labs

ClickHouse, Inc. has hired Carnegie Mellon University database professor Andy Pavlo as vice president of database research to establish and lead ClickHouse Labs, a new research organization, the company said on August 3, 2026.

Pavlo is a well-known figure in database systems: he teaches the field at Carnegie Mellon using ClickHouse in his courses, and previously co-founded and ran OtterTune, a database-tuning startup, as chief executive. ‘I am excited to announce that I am joining ClickHouse to establish and lead a new research team called ClickHouse Labs,’ Pavlo said, describing the group’s goal as conducting research with scientific value and turning the best ideas into technology that matters to users.

The group will pursue work across database and data architectures, query processing, systems performance and infrastructure, spanning both the core ClickHouse analytics database and the company’s managed PostgreSQL service. ClickHouse said the lab will also study how AI and agentic technologies integrate with databases, the question of how autonomous software agents query, write to and reason over data stores.

Pavlo said the team would work alongside ClickHouse engineers, customers and industry partners rather than in isolation, a model meant to move research into shipping products faster than a detached lab would. The company disclosed no funding figure for the effort.

Hiring a tenured academic to run an in-house research arm is a familiar move for infrastructure companies trying to signal technical depth and recruit. Whether ClickHouse Labs produces published research, shipped features or mostly recruiting cachet will be clear from what it puts out over the next year.