Principal Performance Engineer

About

EDB provides a data and AI platform that enables organizations to harness the full power of Postgres for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads across any cloud, anywhere. EDB empowers enterprises to control risk, manage costs and scale efficiently for a data and AI‑led world. Serving more than 1,500 customers globally and as the leading contributor to the vibrant and fast‑growing PostgreSQL community, EDB supports major government organizations, financial services, media and information technology companies. EDB’s data‑driven solutions enable customers to modernize legacy systems and break data silos while leveraging enterprise‑grade open source technologies. EDB delivers the confidence of up to 99.999 % high availability with mission‑critical capabilities such as security, compliance controls, and observability.

Candidate Note: This position is 100 % remote for candidates based in EU/UK.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain repeatable end‑to‑end benchmarks for database and AI workloads.
• Evaluate throughput, latency, concurrency, scalability, and stability across OLTP/OLAP and mixed workloads.
• Measure and optimize performance for GPU/CPU inference pipelines, model serving, and data/feature pipelines; assess cost/performance trade‑offs.
• Develop harnesses, scripts, dashboards, and reproducible environments to run benchmarks consistently.
• Produce clear reports, identify bottlenecks, and recommend fixes.
• Partner with database engineers, AI engineers, field teams, and product management to define performance goals and acceptance criteria.
• Establish standards for test hygiene, statistical rigor, hardware normalization, and benchmark governance.

Requirements

• 8+ years in performance engineering, benchmarking, SRE, or systems engineering (database and/or AI systems).
• Strong understanding of performance concepts and stochastic modeling: latency percentiles, tail behavior, throughput, concurrency, queueing, saturation, and capacity planning.
• Strong understanding of database internals (Postgres or equivalent databases).
• Hands‑on experience benchmarking databases and/or distributed systems (e.g., Postgres or similar).
• Experience with benchmarking tools and harnesses (e.g., pgbench, HammerDB, TPC‑like workloads, custom harnesses).
• Proficient in Python and/or Go for automation and data analysis; strong scripting skills (Bash); skills in eBPF.
• Experience with Linux performance profiling (e.g., perf, flamegraphs, strace, iostat, vmstat).
• Ability to communicate findings clearly and drive performance improvements with engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications (What will give you an edge)

• Experience with active benchmarking techniques.
• Experience with vector databases / vector search benchmarking (recall/latency trade‑offs, indexing, tuning).
• PostgreSQL performance tuning (autovacuum, WAL, replication, connection scaling).
• RAG pipelines: ingestion + embeddings + vector retrieval + reranking + generation.
• Familiarity with AI stack components: model serving, GPU profiling.
• Background in storage and networking performance (I/O patterns, filesystem tuning, kernel tuning).

Benefits

• Access to CuraLinc for health and wellness tips and practices.
• Wellness Fridays (extended through December 2026).
• Additional perks and benefits detailed on the career site (region‑specific information available from Talent Acquisition).

Equal Opportunity

EDB is an equal‑opportunity workplace. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Our culture is built on trust, respect, and the embrace of a wide array of people and ideas.