Lead Performance Engineer - Distributed Database Systems

Leadout Capital; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Leadout Capital seeks a Senior/Lead Performance Engineer to advance distributed database systems powering a major platform. You will collaborate with database, storage, and analytics teams to push performance and scalability across production fleets, build benchmarks, and deliver telemetry-driven insights.

The role emphasizes rigorous root-cause analysis, profiling, and end-to-end ownership from research to production, with opportunities to publish work and impact scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of performance engineering on systems software, ideally databases, storage, or distributed systems.
• Strong CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and memory management.
• Strong coding skills in Java or C/C++.
• Practical experience with load, benchmark, and regression testing for multi-tenant workloads at scale.
• Experience with telemetry, dashboards, and monitoring against performance targets.
• Fluency with Linux, OS internals, and shell/Python scripting.

Responsibilities

• Drive the design and scalability of the database stack with development teams, from research through production delivery.
• Profile the database engine and storage service to find optimization opportunities for large customers.
• Identify root causes of performance and scalability problems and drive fixes with owning teams.
• Lead benchmarking and modeling to guide hardware selection and capacity planning for the fleet.
• Build telemetry, dashboards, and analysis showing production fleet performance against targets.
• Own performance qualification of SalesforceDB releases by building workloads and benchmarks for go/no-go decisions.

Skills

Performance engineering

Java/C/C++

Python

Linux internals

SQL analysis

Telemetry dashboards

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Splunk

JVM profiling

Job description

Leadout Capital seeks a Senior/Lead Performance Engineer to advance distributed database systems powering a major platform. You will collaborate with database, storage, and analytics teams to push performance and scalability across production fleets, build benchmarks, and deliver telemetry-driven insights.

The role emphasizes rigorous root-cause analysis, profiling, and end-to-end ownership from research to production, with opportunities to publish work and impact scale.