Staff Performance Engineer
About The Position
Aerospike is seeking a Staff Performance Engineer to join its Quality Engineering team. The role focuses on characterizing the performance and reliability of Aerospike’s database platform, primarily its server and client libraries, while contributing to other product areas as needed. The engineer will work within the regression practice to prevent performance regressions from reaching customers across a growing set of builds, releases, and products. They will design representative workloads, establish repeatable baselines, detect issues before release, and expand performance coverage. The role also involves integrating shared benchmark and cluster tooling into regular regression workflows and creating systems that developers and Quality Engineering can extend. It is a hands-on position combining benchmark tuning, production-like cluster debugging, and improvements to performance testing systems.
Requirements
- Strong programming experience in at least one systems-oriented language, such as Java, C/C++, Go, or Python.
- Experience designing, running, and interpreting benchmarks or load tests for distributed systems, databases, or similarly latency-sensitive platforms.
- Solid understanding of database architecture, indexing, query processing, and performance tuning.
- Experience with observability tools and techniques such as metrics dashboards, tracing/profiling, and system-level monitoring, for example Prometheus/Grafana, eBPF, or equivalent.
- Experience with Linux/Unix environments and practical system administration for test and production-like systems.
- Experience automating test or deployment environments using infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, or container/orchestration tools, such as Ansible, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, or similar.
- Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex performance problems across application, database, network, storage, and hardware layers.
- Strong analytical skills and excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to engineering and non-engineering audiences.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with NoSQL or real-time data platforms; experience with Aerospike or similar systems is a plus.
- Experience with database client libraries, SDKs, or application-side performance tuning.
- Experience operating or testing large-scale distributed systems in production or production-like environments.
- Experience building or maintaining automated regression systems, including baseline management and outlier/regression detection.
- Experience working across bare-metal and cloud test environments.
- Experience integrating benchmark or cluster-provisioning tools into CI/CD or scheduled test pipelines.
- Experience expanding test coverage across multiple products and release lines.
Responsibilities
- Design workloads that stress and characterize system performance and reliability as experienced by customers.
- Build and maintain performance baselines across builds, hardware profiles, and configuration variants, and use statistical rigor to identify regressions and improvements.
- Run and evolve performance regression as a pre-release quality gate across dedicated bare-metal clusters and remote containerized test environments, selecting the appropriate environment for each workload.
- Investigate performance issues reported by customers or found in internal testing, reproduce problems, isolate root causes, and drive effective fixes.
- Analyze and optimize server and client performance, including indexing, query execution, data access paths, and client/server interaction.
- Integrate benchmark and cluster tooling into regular regression pipelines, expand automated nightly and pre-release gates, and prioritize high-value coverage additions.
- Collaborate with Product R&D to ensure performance and reliability requirements are reflected in development and release processes.
- Create and maintain documentation on benchmark methodology, baseline management, environment setup, and performance best practices.
- Engage with customers to understand deployment patterns, validate performance claims, and translate field requirements into actionable improvements.
- Stay current with industry trends in database performance, observability, and test automation.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
