Principal Software Engineer, Performance at Jobgether – United States
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About This Position
This position is posted by Jobgether on behalf of a partner company. We are currently looking for a Principal Software Engineer, Performance in the United States.
This role sits at the highest technical level of performance engineering, shaping how large-scale distributed systems are designed, measured, and optimized across a global platform. You will define and drive the long-term performance strategy across infrastructure, backend systems, and product experiences, ensuring speed and efficiency remain core engineering principles at scale. The position spans deep technical execution and organizational influence, requiring you to set standards for observability, profiling, and system-wide optimization. You will partner with multiple engineering domains to connect performance metrics directly to user experience and business outcomes. This is a highly strategic, hands-on leadership role where you will build foundational systems and influence engineering culture across the company. The environment is fast-moving, highly technical, and deeply collaborative, with strong emphasis on measurable impact and long-term scalability.
- Define and lead the company-wide performance strategy across product, infrastructure efficiency, and large-scale system scalability.
- Architect and develop performance profiling, instrumentation, and observability systems across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request paths.
- Build frameworks that enable all backend teams to self-serve performance insights and identify optimization opportunities independently.
- Partner with infrastructure, reliability, backend, and AI engineering teams to maximize fleet efficiency and system utilization.
- Establish and enforce performance SLOs aligned with business and product outcomes, ensuring scalability and reliability across systems.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and hardware trends to guide strategic build-versus-buy decisions for performance-critical systems.
- Mentor and influence engineers across the organization through architectural reviews, technical guidance, and performance best practices.
- Drive alignment between engineering execution and user experience outcomes by connecting system performance to real-world impact.
- 12+ years of experience in performance engineering or systems engineering within large-scale, high-traffic production environments.
- Deep understanding of system architecture, including how software and hardware interact across distributed environments.
- Strong expertise in performance optimization across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed tracing systems.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes and Docker.
- Proven ability to design and implement observability and profiling systems at scale.
- Track record of defining and driving performance objectives tied to organizational SLOs and business goals.
- Strong influence and leadership skills, with experience driving change across multiple engineering teams without direct authority.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage and align senior technical and product leadership.
- Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to distinguish between algorithmic, architectural, and system-level performance issues.
- Competitive base salary ranging from $292,000 to $365,000 USD
- Bonus and equity opportunities, plus employee travel credits
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
- Retirement savings plans with employer support
- Flexible remote work with occasional office or offsite collaboration
- Inclusive and flexible work environment supporting diverse teams
- Strong focus on work-life balance and long-term employee wellbeing
- Disability-inclusive hiring and workplace accommodations
- Opportunities to work on global-scale systems with measurable impact