Senior/Lead Engineer, Performance Engineering

About Salesforce

Senior/Lead Performance Engineer, Distributed Database Systems

What You'll Actually Be Doing

Do you specialize in systems performance? Do you love working with data and automation? Want to be part of something big? Help build the distributed database technology that powers the growth of the Salesforce Platform worldwide.

SalesforceDB is the transactional database behind Salesforce CRM. It runs more than 1.1 trillion transactions per month on thousands of database instances.

The Salesforce Database team is fast-paced and collaborative. We work across all areas of our distributed transactional database technology stack. We are seeking performance engineers to deliver the tools, analysis, and optimizations that take SalesforceDB to new levels of performance and scalability with every release.

Our performance engineers partner closely with database and storage system developers, application performance engineers, infrastructure engineers, and our analytics team. Together, we deliver all the pieces that add up to high performance in production at scale. Your improvements ship across the whole production fleet every release. Some of our work is published at database research conferences such as CIDR. We are a high-performing team with high standards. We value integrity, rigor, and continuous learning.

Core Responsibilities & Scop e

• Drive the design and scalability of our database stack with development teams, from research and conception through delivery in production..
• Find optimization opportunities by profiling the database engine and storage service. Help us meet the performance and scale needs of our largest customers and newly onboarded applications..
• Identify the root cause of performance and scalability problems. Then fix them yourself or drive the fix with the owning team..
• Lead benchmarking and modeling that guide hardware selection and capacity planning for the fleet..
• Build the telemetry, dashboards, and analysis that show how the production fleet performs against its targets..
• Own performance qualification of SalesforceDB releases. Build and run the workloads and benchmarks that decide whether a release goes to production..

You're Our Person If...

• A related technical degree, or equivalent experience..
• 5+ years of performance engineering on systems software, ideally databases, storage, or distributed systems..
• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and memory management..
• Strong coding skills in Java or C/C++..
• Practical experience with load, benchmark, and regression testing, ideally for multi-tenant workloads at scale..
• A track record of root cause analysis for performance and scalability problems in complex distributed systems..
• Strong SQL and performance data analysis skills (CPU, latency, throughput, per-tenant resource use)..
• Experience with telemetry, dashboards, and monitoring against performance targets..
• Fluency with Linux, OS internals, and shell/Python scripting..
• Clear communication and collaboration skills across database, storage, infrastructure, application performance, and analytics teams..
• Integrity and a growth mindset: you report what the data shows, seek feedback, and keep learning..

Even Better If...

• MS or PhD in databases or distributed systems..
• Deep knowledge of database internals: optimizer, query execution, storage, transactions, and concurrency control..
• SQL query optimization..
• Splunk or similar log analytics for performance monitoring..
• Java and C/C++ profiling, JVM tuning, and heap dump analysis..
• Statistical analysis and experimental design..

Posting Statement

In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.