Principal Performance Engineer (Database & AI Benchmarking) in Italy, Texas 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 Italy.

This senior technical role focuses on defining and driving performance excellence across large-scale database and AI systems in a distributed, cloud-native environment. You will be responsible for establishing benchmarking strategy, ensuring performance predictability, and building rigorous frameworks that measure how systems behave under real-world workloads. Acting as a key technical authority, you will collaborate closely with engineering, product, and field teams to translate performance insights into architectural decisions and roadmap direction. The role combines deep systems expertise with hands-on engineering, requiring both strategic thinking and practical execution. You will design scalable benchmarking systems for database and AI workloads, ensuring results are reproducible, measurable, and actionable. This is a high-impact position for someone passionate about system-level performance, data-driven engineering decisions, and influencing technology at scale.

• Define and lead the performance engineering strategy across database and AI workloads, including benchmarking frameworks, regression detection, and performance reporting standards.
• Design and maintain repeatable, end-to-end benchmarks for OLTP, OLAP, and mixed database workloads as well as AI inference and pipeline systems.
• Develop and optimize benchmarking harnesses, automation scripts, and dashboards to ensure consistent and reproducible performance evaluation.
• Analyze system performance across throughput, latency, concurrency, scalability, and stability, identifying bottlenecks and recommending optimizations.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and field teams to define performance targets, acceptance criteria, and architectural improvements.
• Establish performance best practices, including test rigor, workload modeling, hardware normalization, and governance standards.
• Provide executive-ready insights and reports translating complex performance data into clear technical and business recommendations.

• 8+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, SRE, or benchmarking roles, ideally spanning database and/or AI systems.
• Strong expertise in performance concepts such as latency distributions, tail behavior, concurrency, saturation, and capacity planning.
• Deep understanding of database systems (preferably PostgreSQL or similar) and experience benchmarking distributed or large-scale systems.
• Hands-on experience with benchmarking frameworks such as pgbench, HammerDB, TPC-style workloads, or custom performance harnesses.
• Strong programming and automation skills in Python and/or Go, with solid Bash scripting and data analysis capability.
• Experience with Linux performance profiling tools such as perf, flamegraphs, strace, iostat, or vmstat.
• Ability to clearly communicate complex technical findings and influence engineering decisions across teams.
• Strong plus: experience with vector databases, PostgreSQL tuning, AI inference pipelines, GPU profiling, RAG workflows, or storage/network performance optimization.

• Fully remote role within the UK/EU region
• Flexible working environment supporting work-life balance
• Competitive compensation aligned with senior technical expertise
• Strong focus on professional development and continuous learning
• Access to wellness initiatives and employee support programs
• Opportunity to shape performance strategy for cutting-edge database and AI systems
• Inclusive and collaborative engineering culture