Senior Software Performance Engineer
About The Position
As a Senior Performance Engineer on the Behavior Planning team, you will own latency, throughput, memory utilization, and thread safety for our real-time decision-making pipeline. Working alongside staff roboticists who write high-level autonomy logic, your job is to profile the stack, enforce performance budgets, and build execution guardrails that guarantee deterministic, high-throughput execution. Prior background in autonomous vehicles, controls, or robotics math is not required. We are seeking engineers obsessed with system performance, low-level execution concepts, and software profiling tools.
Requirements
- Deep understanding of CPU cache hierarchies (L1/L2/L3), memory alignment, lock-free concurrency models, and Linux OS thread scheduling.
- Hands-on experience with Linux profiling toolchains (e.g., Perf, Tracy, eBPF) and dynamic sanitizers (ASan, TSan, Valgrind).
- Strong proficiency in modern C++ (C++17/20) with a focus on writing low-overhead abstractions, RAII, and cache-friendly data layouts.
- Familiarity with micro-benchmarking frameworks (e.g., Google Benchmark) and performance-regression testing in continuous integration.
- Experience in performance-critical software environments such as game engines, financial technology, database runtimes, or operating system kernels.
- B.S. Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or an equivalent degree.
Nice To Haves
- Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
- At least 5 years of professional experience.
- Prior experience in AV, robotics, or high-throughput real-time control systems.
- Proven track record of designing and scaling automated CI/CD performance testing infrastructure.
Responsibilities
- Instrument the behavior pipeline to measure runtime performance, isolating latency spikes, resource contention, and memory inefficiencies.
- Refactor high-frequency execution loops to maximize cache utilization, eliminate dynamic memory allocations, and reduce tail latency.
- Re-engineer thread boundaries and synchronization logic to maximize multi-core parallel processing while ensuring thread safety.
- Build automated micro-benchmarks and runtime telemetry into CI/CD pipelines to prevent algorithm developers from introducing performance regressions.
- Partner with autonomy teams to establish performant, low-overhead C++ module interfaces for new behavioral features.
Benefits
- Comprehensive healthcare suite including medical, dental, vision, life, and disability plans.
- Domestic partners who have been residing together at least one year are also eligible to participate.
- Health Savings and Flexible Spending Healthcare and Dependent Care Accounts available.
- Rich retirement benefits, including an immediately vested employer safe harbor match.
- Generous paid parental leave as well as a phased return to work.
- Flexible vacation policy in addition to paid company holidays.
- Total Wellness Program providing numerous resources for overall wellbeing
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Associate degree
