Staff Performance Engineer

About the role

We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Performance Engineer to join our Quality Engineering team. In this hands-on role, you will characterize the performance and reliability of Aerospike's database platform, with primary focus on the server and client libraries, and contribute across other product areas as needed. You will work within Quality Engineering's regression practice across many builds, helping ensure regressions do not reach customers despite the challenge of continuously validating an expanding set of releases and products while scaling coverage into current gaps.

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; use them to detect regressions and improvements with statistical rigor.
• Run and evolve performance regression as a pre-release quality gate across dedicated bare-metal clusters and remote containerized test environments, selecting the right 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.

Skills

• 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 (for example, 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 both engineering and non-engineering audiences.

Highly Desirable Experience

• 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 with expanding test coverage across multiple products and release lines.

Pay

Salary Range: $180,000 – $230,000 (Actual compensation will be based on experience, location, and other relevant factors.)