Principal Performance Engineer (Database & AI Benchmarking)

What you will be doing:

• Benchmark design & execution: Build and maintain repeatable end-to-end benchmarks for database and AI workloads
• Database performance engineering: Evaluate throughput, latency, concurrency, scalability, and stability across OLTP/OLAP and mixed workloads.
• AI performance benchmarking: Measure and optimize performance for GPU/CPU inference pipelines, model serving, and data/feature pipelines; assess cost/performance tradeoffs.
• Tooling & automation: Develop harnesses, scripts, dashboards, and reproducible environments to run benchmarks consistently.
• Analysis & reporting: Produce clear reports, identify bottlenecks, and recommend fixes.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with database engineers, AI engineers, the field teams and product management to define performance goals and acceptance criteria.
• Performance best practices: Establish standards for test hygiene, statistical rigor, hardware normalization, and benchmark governance.

What you will bring:

• 8+ years in performance engineering, benchmarking, SRE, or systems engineering (database and/or AI systems).
• Strong understanding of performance concepts and stochastic modeling: latency percentiles, tail behavior, throughput, concurrency, queueing, saturation, and capacity planning.
• Strong understanding of database internals (Postgres or equivalent databases).
• Hands-on experience benchmarking databases and/or distributed systems (e.g., Postgres or similar).
• Experience with benchmarking tools and harnesses (examples: pgbench, HammerDB, TPC-like workloads, custom harnesses).