Performance Engineer - Open Source
About the role
Canonical is creating a new career path for Performance Engineers who bring exceptional clarity to software performance, correctness, and efficiency. We are adding these roles to every engineering team at the company. As an open-source platform, we work at every level of the software stack—from the kernel through server and desktop applications, all the way to the web. Performance engineers will drive skills, tools, culture, and insights across our entire product range.
We have also established a central performance engineering team to develop shared tools, dashboarding capabilities, measurement frameworks, analytical capabilities, and skills. This career focus, called 'percorr,' emphasizes that deep performance insights also improve correctness through better test harnesses and frameworks.
Performance engineers at Canonical often enhance the deepest and most challenging areas of test harnesses, enabling teams to measure previously opaque aspects of their work. We collaborate with major silicon vendors and cloud providers, optimizing the entire stack for specific architectures, CPU families, or hypervisors. Our goal is to ensure Ubuntu users achieve the best performance and efficiency across the stack, from kernel to codec.
Engineers may rotate between products every two years, bringing fresh perspectives to teams while raising the bar for performance across multiple products. Performance and correctness leads are expected to be exceptional individuals and leaders, driving change, sharing insights, and running initiatives.
This career path is ideal for perfectionists and precision artists, whether your focus is on languages like C, C++, Rust, Golang, Python, Java, or Flutter-Dart, or on areas like the kernel, hardware, or CPU instruction sets. Whether optimizing user experience or reducing data center carbon footprints, this role aligns with your passion for precision, rigor, insight, and drive.
Responsibilities
- Drive software performance and correctness in a specific project
- Collaborate with colleagues and the community around the globe
- Work on shared tools and infrastructure for performance measurement, analysis, and reporting
- Teach, train, and develop skills in your team for performance culture and design
- Strengthen test capabilities, harnesses, and pipelines
- Analyze systems and code to understand performance and scalability
- Solve problems directly or through influence, leadership, and skills development
- Review code and technical designs
Requirements
- Exceptional academic track record from both high school and university
- Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or Physics
- Demonstrable personal initiatives to measure and improve performance, efficiency, and correctness in code
- Confidence to respectfully speak up, exchange feedback, and share ideas without hesitation
- Track record of going above-and-beyond expectations to achieve outstanding results
- Leadership and commitment to skills development and mentorship
- Passion for technology evidenced by personal projects and initiatives
- The work ethic and confidence to shine alongside motivated colleagues
- Professional written and spoken English with excellent presentation skills
- Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
- Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
- Appreciative of diversity, polite, and effective in a multi-cultural, multi-national organization
- Thoughtfulness and self-motivation
- Result-oriented, with a personal drive to meet commitments
- Ability to travel internationally twice a year for company events up to two weeks long
Nice-to-have skills
- Low-level CPU insights and assembly language—understanding cache, registers, vectorization, memory
- Kernel performance insights—scheduling, context switching, hardware acceleration
- Distributed systems performance insights—tracing, debugging
- Compiler-level performance insights—profile-guided optimization, inlining, assembler
- Runtime performance insights—Golang, Python, JVM, NodeJS
- Database performance evaluation—plans, indexing, data modeling, tracing, monitoring
- Web browser performance insights—JS, web frameworks, tracing, CSS
- Performance measurement tooling—profiling, eBPF, D-Trace, flamegraphs
- Benchmarks and performance measurement tools—Phoronix Test Suite, others
- Test harnesses and capabilities in C, C++, Rust, Python, Golang, NodeJS, JavaScript
Benefits
- Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person
- Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year
- Annual compensation review
- Recognition rewards
- Annual holiday leave
- Maternity and paternity leave
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
- Priority Pass and travel upgrades for long-haul company events
Pay
We consider geographical location, experience, and performance in shaping compensation worldwide. We revisit compensation annually (and more often for graduates and associates) to ensure we recognize outstanding performance. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance-driven annual bonus or commission.
About Canonical
Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company behind Ubuntu, one of the most important open-source projects and the platform for AI, IoT, and the cloud, we are changing the world of software. We recruit globally and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence—in order to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do.
Most colleagues at Canonical have worked from home since its inception in 2004. Working here is a step into the future, challenging you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game.