Principal Performance Engineer (Cortex Cloud)

Your CareerWe are seeking a Principal Performance Engineer to lead performance engineering initiatives for Cortex Cloud. In this role, you will define and implement strategies to measure, validate, and optimize the performance, scalability, and reliability of distributed microservices running in dynamic cloud environments. Your focus will be on developing robust performance testing frameworks, building automation for continuous performance validation, and identifying bottlenecks across the stack.As a hands-on technical leader, you will work closely with Engineering, DevOps, SRE, Product, and QA teams to ensure our platform consistently delivers low-latency, high-throughput, and resilient services at scale. You’ll also influence architectural decisions with a performance-first mindset and shape best practices for performance testing, observability, and tuning.Your ImpactDesign and implement end-to-end performance testing strategies for distributed cloud-native systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and responsiveness.Build and maintain robust, reusable performance test frameworks and pipelines using tools like JMeter, Locust, or custom Python-based solutions.Develop and execute load, stress, soak, and failover tests to simulate real-world usage patterns, edge cases, and peak load scenarios.Identify system bottlenecks, resource contention, and inefficiencies across services, infrastructure, and code; work cross-functionally to drive resolution.Collaborate with Product and Customer Success teams to understand key customer workflows and usage patterns, translating them into performance test scenarios.Integrate performance tests into CI/CD pipelines and staging environments to enable continuous performance validation and pre-release gatekeeping.Define and track key performance metrics (e.g., latency, throughput, system resource usage) and build dashboards using Prometheus, Grafana, or other observability platforms.Perform deep-dive analysis of performance test results, system telemetry, and application profiling data (e.g., Flamegraphs, heap dumps).Advocate for performance-first design principles across engineering teams; influence architectural decisions to improve system efficiency and testability.Contribute to chaos engineering and fault injection efforts to validate system resilience under adverse conditions.Lead incident retrospectives related to performance degradation and provide guidance for proactive tuning and improvements.Thrive in a fast-paced environment, owning performance initiatives from inception through implementation and continuous iteration.