Senior Director, Performance Engineering - Infrastructure and Reliability

Description

This is a senior leadership role as Senior Director of Performance Engineering in the Product and Technology organization. The goal is to make performance a competitive advantage and a core differentiator for the product.

You will set performance direction across the whole product stack and lead the move to a performance-first culture. You will also build a team of performance engineers who keep optimizing speed, cost efficiency and customer experience.

You will work with product, engineering, infrastructure, security and observability teams so that performance is built into how software is designed, shipped and run.

The company is an enterprise software business with about a billion dollars in revenue and more than 7,000 employees on every continent. Its AI technology underpins its enterprise software products.

Responsibilities

• Set the organization-wide performance vision, strategy and goals, aligned with product direction, customer expectations and market position.
• Define performance standards and SLOs (Service Level Objectives) for latency, throughput, availability and cost across all services, APIs and customer-facing systems.
• Create architecture patterns, design principles and guardrails that make fast, efficient choices the default for engineering teams.
• Own the performance roadmap: set priorities and timelines, and report progress to leadership and stakeholders.
• Make sure performance requirements appear in product specs and architecture reviews from the start.
• Build measurement frameworks covering synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM) and observability-driven insights.
• Work with the Observability team to instrument systems for latency percentiles, throughput, resource use and cost attribution.
• Create performance dashboards and reports that show status to engineers, product leaders and executives.
• Run baselines, benchmarks and regression analysis, and find the causes of performance problems and the best optimization opportunities.
• Turn performance data into guidance for architecture, infrastructure investment and optimization priorities.
• Own performance from the frontend through APIs, backends, databases, caches, message queues and infrastructure.
• Lead optimization work across code, algorithms, database queries, caching, CDN setup, container efficiency and cloud cost.
• Promote practices such as query tuning, async processing, event-driven design, edge caching, resource pooling and connection management.
• Work with infrastructure and cloud operations on capacity planning, resource use, cost attribution and cost-performance trade-offs.
• Test under realistic load, find bottlenecks at peak traffic, and make sure systems scale linearly with demand.
• Own performance strategy for agentic AI systems, including inference latency, throughput, cost per inference, tokens per second and multi-agent orchestration efficiency.
• Set guardrails for agent systems: maximum latency for customer-facing agents, cost budgets, resource limits and concurrent request caps.
• Work with AI/ML and product teams on prompt optimization, caching, batching, token efficiency and model choice for latency trade-offs.
• Measure and reduce end-to-end latency for agent workflows, covering LLM inference, orchestration, tool calls and response generation.
• Build and lead the Performance Engineering team, with specialists in frontend, backend, database, infrastructure efficiency and observability.
• Build a performance-first culture across Product and Technology: make results visible, recognize improvements and hold teams accountable for the performance impact of their changes.
• Mentor engineers and engineering leaders on performance, and place performance experts in product and platform teams.
• Review high-impact designs and pull requests for performance, and advise on performance trade-offs.
• Present performance strategy and results to engineering leadership, product leadership and board or executive stakeholders.

Requirements

• Required: 5+ years of software engineering experience focused on performance engineering, scalability or systems optimization.
• Required: hands-on depth across the performance stack, including frontend optimization, API design and efficiency, backend tuning, database query tuning and caching.
• Required: a record of leading cross-functional performance work at scale, with measurable effects on product speed, customer experience or operating cost.
• Required: strong skills in observability, monitoring and measurement, including instrumenting systems and drawing action from the data.
• Required: experience cutting cloud and infrastructure costs, and knowledge of container orchestration, database optimization and resource efficiency.
• Required: experience designing and tuning systems for scale, including load testing, capacity planning and behavior at peak demand.
• Required: experience with profilers, load testing tools, APM (Application Performance Monitoring), observability platforms and cost management tools.
• Required: strong leadership and communication skills, with the ability to influence engineers and executives on performance investment without formal authority.
• Required: familiarity with AI/ML inference optimization, generative AI latency and cost trade-offs, and agentic system performance.
• Required: experience in a high-scale SaaS, cloud platform or enterprise software company facing major performance and cost challenges.
• Required: a record of cost reduction, including cutting infrastructure spend by 20%+ while keeping or improving performance.
• Required: deep expertise in at least one area such as edge computing, database optimization, distributed systems or microservices performance.
• Required: experience optimizing AI/ML inference pipelines, LLM serving or agentic systems at scale.
• Required: experience in fast-growing organizations where delivery speed and operating efficiency are key advantages.
• Required: published content or conference talks on performance engineering, systems optimization or scalability.
• Required: hands-on design and optimization experience across the full stack, from frontend to infrastructure.
• Required: a record of performance initiatives with clear business results, such as latency gains, cost cuts or better customer experience.
• Required: strong skills with profiling, APM tools, load testing and observability platforms.
• Required: understanding of design trade-offs between latency and throughput, consistency and performance, and feature richness and simplicity.
• Required: experience mentoring and developing technical people and building high-performing teams.
• Required: strong communication skills, with the ability to explain performance concepts and trade-offs to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Required: comfort with cloud infrastructure, container orchestration and cost management, and understanding of cloud architecture patterns.
• You will manage a people team of 4-6+ people covering several performance specialties.
• You will be accountable for measurable gains in product performance, customer experience and operating efficiency, reported to leadership.
• Preferred: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 7+ years in performance engineering, systems optimization or platform engineering.
• Preferred: a track record of changing engineering culture toward performance-first thinking and leading organizational change around performance priorities.
• Preferred: experience optimizing large distributed systems, with deep work in database optimization, caching architectures or microservices performance.
• Preferred: a proven record of leading cost optimization, including infrastructure spend reduction and better operational efficiency.
• Preferred: experience with emerging performance challenges such as AI/ML inference, generative AI, agentic architectures and real-time data processing.
• Preferred: published technical content, open-source contributions or thought leadership in performance engineering and systems optimization.

Conditions

The role offers flexibility and hybrid working options, so you can choose a way of working that suits you.

The company is committed to an inclusive workforce that reflects the varied cultures, backgrounds and viewpoints of its customers, partners and communities.