Principal Performance Engineer (Database & AI Benchmarking)

About EnterpriseDB (EDB): EnterpriseDB is the premier, internationally recognized data and AI platform pioneer, open-source technology leader, and global PostgreSQL authority on an absolute mission to supercharge Postgres database engines everywhere. Serving more than 1,500 enterprise customers worldwide—including top-tier financial service firms, major defense departments, corporate media houses, and software tech platforms—EDB enables modern organizations to break data silos and modernize legacy database backends across any cloud infrastructure. As the primary code contributor to the vibrant, hyper-growth PostgreSQL community, EDB delivers up to 99.999% high availability backed by mission-critical compliance controls, enterprise security lines, and advanced data observability.

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly sophisticated, systems-minded Principal Performance Engineer to join our core global Engineering division in a full-time remote capacity within India. In this technical leadership seat, you will claim complete strategic and individual accountability for making performance engineering a core organizational competency across all our foundational database and AI workloads. Moving completely past typical quality assurance check-boxes, you will set the performance strategy, define realistic multi-tenant workloads, and build deterministic regression detection gates that influence product architecture and roadmap directions. This high-agency role demands a seasoned low-level developer who writes clean backend scripts, interprets stochastic modeling structures natively, and partners across cross-functional groups to deliver predictable data velocities at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Benchmark Architecture: Design, implement, and maintain repeatable, end-to-end performance benchmarks and realistic test workloads for database and AI inference systems.
• Database Performance Engineering: Profile and optimize throughput, concurrency, latency distribution percentiles, scalability metrics, and runtime stability parameters across OLTP, OLAP, and mixed database workloads.
• AI Inference Benchmarking: Measure, analyze, and optimize execution boundaries for GPU and CPU inference pipelines, data/feature preparation layers, and large model serving blocks, assessing cost-to-performance tradeoffs.
• Harness Tooling Development: Build and scale automated benchmark harnesses, reproducible test environments, and metrics dashboards natively utilizing Python, Go (Golang), and Bash.
• Low-Level Linux System Profiling: Isolate deep structural code bottlenecks, saturation indicators, and resource queue constraints inside the Linux operating system kernel using eBPF, perf, flamegraphs, strace, iostat, and vmstat.
• Postgres Internals Hardening: Configure and fine-tune core PostgreSQL instance variables, comprehensively tracking autovacuum processes, WAL configurations, replication behaviors, and connection scaling layers.
• Advanced Vector Search Optimization: Evaluate and benchmark vector databases and vector search frameworks, actively analyzing recall vs. latency tradeoffs, vector embeddings ingestion, and structural indexing strategies.
• RAG Pipeline Assessment: Profile enterprise Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) loops, tuning the performance velocity of data ingestion, embedding models, vector retrieval, reranking, and text generation cycles.
• Cross-Functional Direction Alignment: Partner smoothly beside database developers, AI research engineers, field architecture teams, and Product Management to define performance goals and acceptance rules.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 8+ years of verified professional history running advanced performance engineering, systems benchmarking, site reliability engineering (SRE), or low-level systems architecture.
• Deep, authoritative technical command of database internals and distributed systems concepts (with a preferred specialization centered on PostgreSQL architectures).
• Proven background using common benchmarking suites and test frameworks (such as pgbench, HammerDB, TPC workloads, or custom execution harnesses).
• Expert-tier scripting and automation literacy using Python and Go for programmatic automation, custom data analysis, and test run configuration.
• Hands-on operational tracking of stochastic modeling concepts, comprehensively covering tail latency percentiles, queueing mechanics, saturation, and system capacity planning.
• Outstanding verbal and written communication mechanics, with a demonstrated ability to translate hardware normalization trends and technical constraints into clear, data-driven advice for engineering cells.
• Location Context: Full-time remote parameters open exclusively to qualified performance engineers permanently based anywhere within India to execute from home.

Preferred Strategic Indicators (Nice to Have)

• Prior experience optimizing cloud filesystem layouts, input/output patterns (IOPS), or executing kernel-level storage and networking adjustments.
• Practical familiarity navigating AI stack components, containerized deployments, or specialized hardware profiling suites (such as NVIDIA CUDA/GPU monitoring tools).
• Demonstrated background authoring statistical test hygiene standards, code regression gating, and benchmark governance rules for global technology institutions.

What We Offer

• The exceptional professional canvas to directly program, own, and advance the performance baselines of the world’s leading PostgreSQL platform.
• Highly competitive, capability-calibrated baseline salary structures supplemented by transparent career progression runways and joint goal setting.
• Profound work-from-home remote parameters providing an active virtual-first workflow, flexible working arrangements, and zero physical office travel drag inside India.
• Comprehensive health and wellness provisions, including structured employee assistance plans via CuraLinc alongside global corporate Wellness Fridays extended to December 2026.
• Integration into an elite, inclusive equal-opportunity workplace built on collective trust, technical curiosity, and a shared mission to supercharge Postgres capabilities worldwide.