Senior Director, Performance Engineering

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

1d•$218,400 - $401,400

About The Position

Salesforce is seeking a Senior Director to own the Salesforce Database (SalesforceDB) Performance technology line, including its strategy, organization, and results. SalesforceDB is the transactional database behind Salesforce CRM, handling more than 1.1 trillion transactions per month across thousands of database instances. The role sets direction on a horizon of a year or more, develops and delivers the portfolio V2MOM, and applies deep expertise in the production performance of large distributed databases to deliver improvements across the production fleet. The Senior Director leads a collection of performance teams and managers, owns performance architecture and release qualification, and partners with database, storage, query processing, application performance, infrastructure, and analytics teams. The role is accountable for performance, scalability, capacity planning, service health, and production outcomes; it also develops managers and engineers, makes portfolio resourcing decisions, and builds a high-performing, inclusive, geographically distributed organization.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Subject-matter expertise in performance of large-scale databases, storage, or distributed systems.
Proven experience owning a technology portfolio and delivering successful services or capabilities across multiple releases on a year-plus horizon.
10+ years of engineering management experience, including 5+ years managing other managers, with a record of developing managers and senior individual contributors.
15+ years of performance engineering or software engineering experience in databases, storage, or distributed systems, including 5+ years leading performance, scalability, or release-qualification teams.
Performance engineering background in systems software, ideally databases, storage, or distributed systems; strong computer science fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and memory management; and technical depth to engage on designs and code in Java or C/C++.
Hands-on experience with load, benchmark, and regression testing, ideally for large-scale multi-tenant workloads, and root-cause analysis of performance and scalability problems in complex distributed systems.
Strong SQL and performance data analysis skills, including CPU, latency, throughput, and per-tenant resource use.
Accountability for architecture and trust outcomes beyond a single team’s sprint work.
Strong judgment in prioritization, resourcing, and deciding when to escalate.
Excellent communication across database, storage, infrastructure, application performance, and analytics teams, including setting a vision, communicating risk, and aligning peer leaders.
Integrity, high energy, a growth mindset, willingness to report what data shows and seek feedback, and a collaborative style.

Nice To Haves

MS or PhD in databases or distributed systems.
Deep knowledge of database internals, including optimizer, query execution and optimization, storage, transactions, concurrency control, and memory management.
Experience with performance workloads, system benchmarks, release qualification, and production performance investigation.
Experience with Splunk or similar telemetry, dashboards, and fleet-scale performance management.
Systems programming experience in C/C++ or Java, profiling, JVM tuning, and heap dump analysis.
SQL, Linux, data analysis and visualization, and experimental design skills.
Statistical analysis, benchmarking, and capacity modeling experience.
Knowledge of operating system and network fundamentals, including processes, threads, memory, file systems, storage, and TCP/IP.
Experience with cloud platforms and infrastructure such as AWS or GCP, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Experience leading engineering organizations through V2MOM planning, agile delivery, service ownership, and incident response.

Responsibilities

Own the SalesforceDB Performance technology line and craft and deliver its V2MOM on a planning horizon of a year or more.
Set direction for performance and scalability across the database engine, storage service, and query processing, and align peer leaders around that direction.
Own the performance organization's architectural decisions and maintain a consistent architecture and design process with partner clouds.
Own SalesforceDB release performance qualification and deliver performance capabilities across release qualification, production performance, capacity management, and query and systems optimization.
Lead benchmarking and modeling to guide fleet hardware selection and capacity planning, and oversee telemetry, dashboards, and analysis of production fleet performance against targets.
Maintain organizational trust standards for scalability, service health, and performance plans for every release; establish proactive plans for systemic performance issues and technical debt.
Drive production-first service ownership, coordinate performance-related production incident response within the cloud, and address cross-cloud performance issues on behalf of the database.
Make resourcing decisions to meet portfolio commitments and shift teams as business priorities change.
Stay close to teams and customers affected by database performance and use their input to influence products and operations.
Lead the teams in the performance portfolio, including engineering managers; develop talent from Manager through Director and coach engineers from early career through principal level.
Build and motivate a high-performing, inclusive, geographically distributed organization and peer leadership group; communicate bad news early, address solvable problems, and escalate when needed.
Partner with senior leaders and architects in other clouds on performance, capacity, and release risk, building durable relationships and keeping architects informed and empowered.