Performance Engineer - Open Source

Canonical Group - Houston, TX

Full-time - Entry Level

Remote - Houston, TX

501-1,000 employees

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

About the position

Canonical is seeking Performance Engineers to enhance software performance, correctness, and efficiency across its open-source platform, Ubuntu. This role involves collaborating with global teams to drive performance engineering skills and tools, while also contributing to a central performance engineering team focused on shared tools and measurement frameworks. Performance Engineers will have the opportunity to work on various projects, ensuring optimal performance across the software stack and contributing to a culture of performance excellence within the organization.

Responsibilities

• Drive software performance and correctness in a specific project
• Collaborate with colleagues and community around the globe
• Work on shared tools and infrastructure for performance measurement, analysis and reporting
• Teach, train and develop skills in your team for performance culture and design
• Strengthen test capabilities, harnesses and pipelines
• Analyze systems and code to understand performance and scalability
• Solve problems directly or through influence, leadership and skills development
• Review code and technical designs

Requirements

• Exceptional academic track record from both high school and university
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics
• Demonstrable personal initiatives to measure and improve performance, efficiency and correctness in code
• Confidence to respectfully speak up, exchange feedback, and share ideas without hesitation
• Track record of going above-and-beyond expectations to achieve outstanding results
• Leadership and commitment to skills development and mentorship
• Passion for technology evidenced by personal projects and initiatives
• The work ethic and confidence to shine alongside motivated colleagues
• Professional written and spoken English with excellent presentation skills
• Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
• Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
• Appreciative of diversity, polite and effective in a multi-cultural, multi-national organisation
• Thoughtfulness and self-motivation
• Result-oriented, with a personal drive to meet commitments

Nice-to-haves

• Low-level CPU insights and assembly language - understanding cache, registers, vectorization, memory
• Kernel performance insights - scheduling, context switching, hardware acceleration
• Distributed systems performance insights - tracing, debugging
• Compiler level performance insights - profile guided optimization, inlining, assembler
• Runtime performance insights - Golang, Python, JVM, NodeJS
• Database performance evaluation - plans, indexing, data modelling, tracing, monitoring
• Web browser performance insights - JS, web frameworks, tracing, CSS
• Performance measurement tooling - profiling, eBPF, D-Trace, flamegraphs
• Benchmarks and performance measurement tools - Phoronix Test Suite, others
• Test harnesses and capabilities in C, C++, Rust, Python, Golang, NodeJS, JavaScript

Benefits

• Performance-driven annual bonus or commission
• Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year
• Annual compensation review
• Recognition rewards
• Annual holiday leave
• Maternity and paternity leave
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
• Priority Pass, and travel upgrades for long haul company events