Performance Engineer - Open Source
Canonical
WorldwideremotePosted 1 month ago
Skill Required
Performance-EngineeringSoftware-EngineerQA-EngineeringSystems-EngineeringPerformance-EngineerPerformance-Engineering-JobsOpen-Source-EngineerPerformance-Engineering-and-OptimizationOpen-Source-EngineeringSystem DesignData WarehousingEngineeringJavaScriptanalyticalObservabilitydebuggingQuery OptimizationFlutterwrittenPythonGolangdesignNode.jsLinuxC++CloudJavaRustCSSandAIFulltime
Key highlights
- Compensation: Base pay plus performance-driven annual bonus or commission
- Key Benefit: USD 2,000 annual personal learning and development budget
- Notable Requirement: Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics
- Notable Requirement: Ability to travel internationally twice a year
Role overview
Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems, most notably Ubuntu, used in public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation, and IoT. The company is founder-led, profitable, growing, and a pioneer of global distributed collaboration with over 1000 colleagues in 70+ countries. Canonical has created a new career path for Performance Engineers ('percorr') to bring exceptional clarity to software performance, correctness, and efficiency across every engineering team. This role is designed for perfectionists and precision artists who can drive performance engineering skills, tools, and culture across the entire software stack, from the kernel and CPU up to server, desktop, and web applications.
Responsibilities
- Drive software performance and correctness in a specific project
- Collaborate with colleagues and community around the globe
- Work on shared tools and infrastructure for performance measurement, analysis and reporting
- Teach, train and develop skills in your team for performance culture and design
- Strengthen test capabilities, harnesses and pipelines
- Analyze systems and code to understand performance and scalability
- Solve problems directly or through influence, leadership and skills development
- Review code and technical designs
Requirements
- Exceptional academic track record from both high school and university
- Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics
- Demonstrable personal initiatives to measure and improve performance, efficiency and correctness in code
- Confidence to respectfully speak up, exchange feedback, and share ideas without hesitation
- Track record of going above-and-beyond expectations to achieve outstanding results
- Leadership and commitment to skills development and mentorship
- Passion for technology evidenced by personal projects and initiatives
- The work ethic and confidence to shine alongside motivated colleagues
- Professional written and spoken English with excellent presentation skills
- Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
- Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
- Appreciative of diversity, polite and effective in a multi-cultural, multi-national organisation
- Thoughtfulness and self-motivation
- Result-oriented, with a personal drive to meet commitments
- Ability to travel internationally twice a year, for company events up to two weeks long
Nice to have
- Low-level CPU insights and assembly language - understanding cache, registers, vectorization, memory
- Kernel performance insights - scheduling, context switching, hardware acceleration
- Distributed systems performance insights - tracing, debugging
- Compiler level performance insights - profile guided optimization, inlining, assembler
- Runtime performance insights - Golang, Python, JVM, NodeJS
- Database performance evaluation - plans, indexing, data modelling, tracing, monitoring
- Web browser performance insights - JS, web frameworks, tracing, CSS
- Performance measurement tooling - profiling, eBPF, D-Trace, flamegraphs
- Benchmarks and performance measurement tools - Phoronix Test Suite, others
- Test harnesses and capabilities in C, C++, Rust, Python, Golang, NodeJS, JavaScript
Benefits
- Performance-driven annual bonus or commission
- Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person
- Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year
- Annual compensation review
- Recognition rewards
- Annual holiday leave
- Maternity and paternity leave
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
- Priority Pass, and travel upgrades for long haul company events
Additional details
- Location: We have teams in every time zone, and can accommodate applications from almost any country.
- Performance and correctness engineers may move between products every two years to raise the bar for performance across an array of products and bring fresh eyes to processes.
- The role is open to those with various language focuses (C, C++, Rust, Golang, Python, Java, Flutter-Dart, etc.) or interests in kernel, hardware, CPU instruction sets, user experience, or data center efficiency.
- Canonical is an equal opportunity employer and fosters a workplace free from discrimination.
- Originally posted on Himalayas