Senior Performance Engineer, Data Products

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

📋 Description

• Take charge of performance investigations throughout the product and data stack, transitioning from slow queries or subpar user experiences to identifiable root causes and enhancements in production.

• Design and assess modifications to data architecture.

• Collaborate with Product, frontend, and backend engineers to adjust product behavior in alignment with the characteristics of the underlying data using techniques such as request batching, debouncing, caching, and pagination.

• Create representative benchmarks for key combinations of filters, datasets, and product workflows.

• Evaluate query latency, throughput, concurrency, and infrastructure consumption, with a specific focus on the performance and cost of datastores (we utilize ClickHouse Cloud).

• Analyze the potential performance impact of upstream dataset modifications before they are deployed to production.

• Review upcoming product requests and suggest technical or product strategies that balance functionality, responsiveness, scalability, and cost.

• Develop prototypes for competing solutions, clearly articulate their trade-offs, and validate the chosen approach in a production environment.

• Enhance performance instrumentation, monitoring, and regression detection across data-driven product experiences.

• Create reusable patterns and capabilities as the Data Product platform evolves into a supporting layer for additional products and teams.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience in building and optimizing production data systems, data-intensive applications, or analytical products.

• Advanced SQL expertise and strong proficiency in Python or another general-purpose programming language.

• Experience in optimizing analytical workloads within column-oriented databases or data warehouses.

• Proven track record of reconfiguring how data is organized or stored to enhance application performance, which may include restructuring tables, precomputing results, altering indexes, or optimizing data querying methods.

• Familiarity with using query plans, profiling, benchmarks, and production telemetry to identify performance issues.

• Capability to reason across system boundaries, including databases, APIs, backend services, client request patterns, and product interactions.

• A hypothesis-driven approach to performance tasks: define the issue, set a baseline, test alternatives, and quantify the production results.

• A mindset focused on linking technical efforts to user or business outcomes.

• Possess product judgment, with the ability to recognize when modifying the product experience is more effective than altering the underlying data system.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive compensation with equity options.

• Exceptional healthcare plan options, including Medical, Dental, and Vision, along with FSA, DCFSA, and HSA alternatives.

• Company-sponsored disability and life insurance.

• Unlimited paid time off (PTO).

• 401(k) plan with 4% matching.

• Fully remote work opportunities and flexible working hours.

• $750 budget for work-from-home setup.

• Paid biannual in-person company summits.

• Quarterly $150 co-hanging stipend for meetings with colleagues.

• Monthly $100 health and wellness benefit.

• Generous paid family leave.

• Annual $1,200 stipend for learning and development.