Senior Performance Architect — Petabyte-Scale Systems

541 Cisco Systems Poland sp. Z o.o.; Kraków; Hybrid; PLN 300,000 - 520,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hybrid work

Career growth

Mentorship opportunities

Job summary

Cisco is seeking a Senior Perf Engineer to join the PerfOpt team. You will drive performance improvements across large distributed systems, profile memory and CPU, and optimize tail latency in production workloads.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate across partner teams, and guide architecture decisions using profiling data, benchmarks, and telemetry. The role offers a flexible hybrid work model and opportunities to influence performance standards at scale.

Qualifications

• Advanced C++ production experience with memory management and performance trade-offs.
• CPU/memory profiling and flamegraph analysis (perf, eBPF, VTune).
• Lock contention resolution and atomic/memory ordering concepts.
• Latency optimization in distributed architectures.
• Benchmarking with sound test design.
• Performance modeling to predict scaling limits.
• Architecture and system design for performance and scalability.
• Docker and Kubernetes in production performance contexts.
• Strong Python for tooling and telemetry pipelines.
• Linux internals: scheduler, memory, I/O, and filesystems.
• Git and CI (e.g. GitLab CI) for automating builds, tests, benchmarks.
• Leadership track record and clear communication.
• AI-savviness in delivery speed and production workflows.
• Mentor and grow engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead performance work from hypothesis through instrumentation and design to measured customer impact.
• Coordinating across teams as needed to drive performance improvements.
• Design petabyte-scale components for memory, concurrency, I/O, and tail latency.
• Instrument production with telemetry, eBPF, and continuous profiling to measure performance.
• Present evidence-based recommendations to partners and stakeholders.
• Mentor peers and less experienced engineers on the team.

Skills

Advanced C++

Perf profiling

Lock contention

Latency optimization

Benchmarks

Performance modeling

System design

Docker/Kubernetes

Python tooling

Linux internals

Git/CI

Technical leadership

Data-driven decisions

Communication

AI in delivery

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree + 8 years

Master's degree + 6 years

PhD + 3 years

Tools

GitLab CI

Job description

Cisco is seeking a Senior Perf Engineer to join the PerfOpt team. You will drive performance improvements across large distributed systems, profile memory and CPU, and optimize tail latency in production workloads.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate across partner teams, and guide architecture decisions using profiling data, benchmarks, and telemetry. The role offers a flexible hybrid work model and opportunities to influence performance standards at scale.