Principal Performance Engineer, Database & AI Benchmarking

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Europe.

📋 Description

• Make performance a fundamental competency within our database and AI operations.

• Establish the performance engineering strategy, which includes defining benchmarks, realistic workloads, regression detection and gating, along with clear reporting suited for executives.

• Collaborate with Engineering, Solutions Verification, and Product teams to ensure we provide consistent performance at scale.

• Shape product strategy by pinpointing systemic bottlenecks, influencing architectural and roadmap decisions, and spearheading cross-team initiatives.

• Develop and uphold repeatable end-to-end benchmarks for database and AI operations.

• Assess throughput, latency, concurrency, scalability, and stability across OLTP/OLAP and mixed workloads.

• Measure and enhance performance for GPU/CPU inference pipelines, model serving, and data/feature pipelines, while evaluating cost/performance trade-offs.

• Create harnesses, scripts, dashboards, and reproducible environments to ensure consistent benchmark execution.

• Generate clear reports, identify bottlenecks, and suggest solutions.

• Collaborate with database engineers, AI engineers, field teams, and product management to define performance objectives and acceptance criteria.

• Set standards for test hygiene, statistical rigor, hardware normalization, and benchmark governance.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of experience in performance engineering, benchmarking, SRE, or systems engineering, particularly related to database and/or AI systems.

• In-depth knowledge of performance concepts and stochastic modeling, including latency percentiles, tail behavior, throughput, concurrency, queueing, saturation, and capacity planning.

• Strong understanding of database internals, especially Postgres or equivalent databases.

• Practical experience in benchmarking databases and/or distributed systems (e.g., Postgres or similar).

• Familiarity with benchmarking tools and harnesses (for example: pgbench, HammerDB, TPC-like workloads, custom harnesses).

• Proficient in Python and/or Go for automation and data analysis, with strong scripting capabilities (Bash) and skills in eBPF.

• Experience with Linux performance profiling tools (e.g., perf, flamegraphs, strace, iostat, vmstat).

• Ability to clearly communicate findings and drive performance enhancements with engineering teams.

🏝️ Benefits

• EDB is dedicated to supporting the overall well-being of our employees by offering a variety of benefits and resources that promote a healthy work-life balance and wellness.

• We provide access to CuraLinc for health and wellness tips and practices.

• Wellness Fridays extending until December 2026!

• Visit our career site for additional information on perks and benefits, and contact our Talent Acquisition team for region-specific benefits.