Principal Performance & Reliability Engineer

Aerospike is the real-time database for mission-critical use cases and workloads, including machine learning, generative, and agentic AI. Aerospike powers millions of transactions per second with millisecond latency, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership compared to other databases.

Global leaders, including Adobe, Airtel, Barclays, Criteo, DBS Bank, Experian, Grab, HDFC Bank, PayPal, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Trade Desk, and Wayfair, rely on Aerospike for customer 360, fraud detection, real-time bidding, profile stores, recommendation engines, and other use cases. 

 At Aerospike, we dream big and deliver even bigger. Our mission is to unleash the power of the world’s real-time data with a database built for infinite scale, speed, and sustainability.

If you're ready to shape the future of data, join us.

Position Overview: We are seeking a highly skilled Performance & Reliability Engineer to join our dynamic engineering team. In this role, you will focus on characterizing the performance and reliability of Aerospike’s graph database, ensuring they meet the high standards of efficiency and scalability required by our enterprise customers. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to enhance our graph database capabilities, troubleshoot performance issues, and implement improvements to drive overall system performance.

Key Responsibilities:

• Collaboration: Work closely with the Product R&D team to understand performance and reliability requirements and integrate improvements into the development process.
• Systems Characterization: Design workloads that stress and characterize the system's performance and reliability of the product as experienced by the customer. Use those workloads to evaluate the impact of changes and identify performance bottlenecks and reliability concerns.
• Troubleshooting: Investigate and resolve performance related issues reported by customers or identified through internal testing, providing timely and effective solutions.
• Architecture and Design: Contribute to the design and architecture of graph database features, ensuring they are built for scalability and high performance.
• Performance Optimization: Analyze and optimize the performance of Aerospike’s graph database features, including query execution, indexing, and data retrieval.
• Documentation: Create and maintain comprehensive documentation on performance optimization techniques, benchmarks, and best practices.
• Customer Interaction: Engage with customers to gather feedback on performance and understand their requirements, translating their needs into actionable performance improvements. Additionally, work with lighthouse customers to convince them of our expertise in understanding how our product works at scale, best-practices for operations and observability, and our ability to support customer deployments. 
• Continued Professional Development: Stay current with industry trends and emerging technologies, and scour the past for ideas related to graph databases, and improvements to performance and reliability. Apply this knowledge to enhance Aerospike’s offerings.

Requirements

• Technical Skills:
• Experience with at least one programming language, e.g. Java, C/C++, Go, etc…
• Experience running large scale distributed systems in production
• Experience with Database Clients
• Solid understanding of database indexing, query processing, and optimization techniques. Strong background in database architecture, query optimization, and performance tuning
• Experience with Observability tools and techniques such as eBPF, Prometheus and Grafana
• Unix/Linux system administration (RedHat, CentOS, CoreOS)
• Experience automating deployments leveraging tools such as Ansible, Terraform, and Kubernetes
• Strong troubleshooting and excellent technical communication skills, demonstrable contribution to having created high impact in in performance engineering or similar roles for distributed systems
• In-depth experience with a modern NoSQL database. Experience with Aerospike or similar NoSQL databases is highly desirable
• Analytical Skills: Excellent problem-solving skills with the ability to diagnose and address complex performance issues.
• Communication: Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to clearly convey technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Team Player: Ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced environment and contribute to a culture of continuous improvement.

Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing an environment free from discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. Join us at Aerospike and be part of a dynamic team that is shaping the future of data management. Salary Range for California Based Applicants: [$170,000 - $195,000] (actual compensation will be determined based on experience, location, and other factors permitted by law)