Principal Performance Engineer (Database & AI Benchmarking) in India at Jobgether

This position is posted by Jobgether on behalf of a partner company. We are currently looking for a Principal Performance Engineer (Database & AI Benchmarking) in India.

In this role, you will define and drive the performance engineering strategy for large-scale database and AI systems, ensuring predictable, measurable, and optimized performance across complex workloads. You will design and own benchmarking frameworks that evaluate both traditional database systems and modern AI pipelines, including inference and data processing workflows. The position plays a critical role in identifying system bottlenecks, shaping architectural decisions, and influencing product direction through deep performance insights. You will collaborate closely with engineering, product, and field teams to establish performance standards and ensure systems meet strict scalability and reliability expectations. The environment is highly technical and research-driven, combining systems engineering, database internals, and AI performance optimization. This is a senior individual contributor role with broad influence across product and engineering organizations.

• Define and lead performance engineering strategy, including benchmarks, workload design, regression detection, and performance governance for database and AI systems.
• Design and maintain repeatable benchmarking frameworks for OLTP, OLAP, and AI workloads to ensure consistent and reliable performance measurement.
• Evaluate and optimize database performance across throughput, latency, concurrency, scalability, and stability in complex distributed environments.
• Benchmark AI workloads including inference pipelines, GPU/CPU utilization, model serving, and data/feature pipelines, analyzing cost-performance tradeoffs.
• Build automation tools, scripts, and dashboards in support of reproducible benchmarking environments and performance reporting.
• Analyze performance data using statistical rigor, identify bottlenecks, and provide actionable recommendations to engineering teams.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, product, and field teams to define performance goals, standards, and acceptance criteria.

• 8+ years of experience in performance engineering, benchmarking, systems engineering, or SRE roles with exposure to database and/or AI systems.
• Strong understanding of performance concepts including latency percentiles, throughput, concurrency, queueing theory, and capacity planning.
• Deep knowledge of database internals, preferably PostgreSQL or similar systems, with hands-on tuning and optimization experience.
• Experience building and running benchmarking frameworks using tools such as pgbench, HammerDB, TPC-style workloads, or custom harnesses.
• Strong programming and automation skills in Python and/or Go, with solid Bash scripting capabilities.
• Experience with Linux performance profiling tools such as perf, flamegraphs, strace, iostat, and vmstat.
• Ability to communicate complex performance insights clearly and influence engineering decisions.
• Nice to have: experience with vector databases, RAG pipelines, GPU profiling, storage/network tuning, and AI model serving systems.

• Competitive compensation aligned with experience and industry benchmarks.
• Remote-first work environment based in India.
• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge database and AI performance challenges at global scale.
• Exposure to advanced technologies including PostgreSQL internals and AI inference systems.
• Strong focus on engineering excellence, research-driven problem solving, and technical ownership.
• Wellness and work-life balance support programs, including access to wellness resources and dedicated wellness Fridays.
• Inclusive, collaborative culture emphasizing diversity, trust, and continuous learning.