Senior/Lead Performance Engineer (Distributed Databases)

Quick Facts

• Role: Senior/Lead Performance Engineer (Distributed Databases)
• Focus: Distributed transactional database performance, scalability, benchmarking, and production telemetry

Description

Help build and optimize SalesforceDB, the distributed transactional database powering massive CRM workloads. You will profile performance, identify root causes of scalability issues, drive fixes, lead benchmarking and modeling, and run performance qualification so improvements ship across the production fleet.

Responsibilities

• Drive the design and scalability of the database stack with development teams (research and conception through production delivery)
• Find optimization opportunities by profiling the database engine and storage service
• Identify root causes of performance and scalability problems and fix them directly or drive fixes with owning teams
• Lead benchmarking and modeling to guide hardware selection and capacity planning for the fleet
• Build telemetry, dashboards, and analysis that measure production performance vs. targets
• Own performance qualification of database releases by building and running workloads and benchmarks

Requirements

• Related technical degree or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of performance engineering on systems software (ideally databases, storage, or distributed systems)
• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, memory management
• Strong coding skills in Java or C/C++
• Practical experience with load, benchmark, and regression testing (ideally for multi-tenant workloads at scale)
• Track record of root cause analysis for performance and scalability problems in complex distributed systems
• Strong SQL and performance data analysis (CPU, latency, throughput, per-tenant resource use)
• Experience with telemetry, dashboards, and monitoring against performance targets
• Fluency with Linux, OS internals, and shell/Python scripting
• Clear communication and collaboration across database, storage, infrastructure, application performance, and analytics teams

Benefits

• Work-life balance support and wellbeing resources
• Time off programs, medical/dental/vision, mental health support, and paid parental leave
• Life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program
• AI agents to accelerate impact