Performance Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Performance Engineer - Open Source based in South Africa.

This role is designed for an exceptional engineer focused on improving software performance, correctness, scalability, and efficiency across the technology stack.

• Drive software performance, scalability, efficiency, and correctness within a specific engineering project.
• Analyze systems and code across the stack to identify performance bottlenecks, scalability limitations, and opportunities for optimization.
• Collaborate with engineering teams and open source communities globally to investigate and resolve complex technical challenges.
• Develop and contribute to shared tools and infrastructure for performance measurement, profiling, analysis, benchmarking, and reporting.
• Strengthen testing capabilities, test harnesses, and engineering pipelines to make previously difficult-to-measure system behaviors observable and verifiable.
• Establish and promote effective performance engineering practices, measurement frameworks, and analytical approaches.
• Teach, train, mentor, and develop colleagues to strengthen performance-focused engineering skills and culture.
• Solve technical problems directly while also influencing teams through technical leadership, knowledge sharing, and skills development.
• Review code and technical designs with a focus on performance, efficiency, scalability, and correctness.
• Contribute to performance optimization across different hardware architectures, CPUs, cloud environments, runtimes, and system components.
• Share insights, tools, and best practices that can improve performance engineering across a broader range of products and engineering teams.

• Exceptional academic track record at both high school and university level.
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a comparable technical discipline.
• Demonstrable personal initiatives or professional experience focused on improving software performance, efficiency, scalability, or correctness.
• Strong experience with Linux, with Debian or Ubuntu experience preferred.
• Ability to understand complex systems deeply and investigate performance across multiple layers of the technology stack.
• Professional written and spoken English with strong presentation and communication skills.
• Confidence to respectfully challenge ideas, exchange feedback, and communicate technical perspectives openly.
• Proven ability to deliver outstanding results and take ownership of challenging engineering problems.
• Leadership mindset with a commitment to mentoring colleagues and developing technical skills within a team.
• Strong passion for technology, demonstrated through personal projects, open source contributions, or other initiatives.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, accountability, and self-motivation.
• Results-oriented approach with a strong personal drive to meet commitments and continuously improve.
• Comfortable working effectively within multicultural, multinational, globally distributed teams.
• Ability to travel internationally twice per year for company events lasting up to two weeks.
• Nice-to-have technical expertise includes:
• Low-level CPU architecture and assembly language, including caches, registers, vectorization, and memory behavior.
• Kernel performance, including scheduling, context switching, and hardware acceleration.
• Distributed systems performance, tracing, and debugging.
• Compiler-level optimization, including profile-guided optimization, inlining, and assembly analysis.
• Runtime performance across technologies such as Golang, Python, JVM, and Node.js.
• Database performance evaluation involving query plans, indexing, data modeling, tracing, and monitoring.
• Web browser and web application performance, including JavaScript, web frameworks, tracing, and CSS.
• Performance measurement and profiling tools such as eBPF, D-Trace, and flamegraphs.
• Benchmarking tools such as the Phoronix Test Suite.
• Test harness development using C, C++, Rust, Python, Golang, Node.js, or JavaScript.

• Performance-driven annual bonus or commission in addition to base compensation.
• Compensation reviewed based on geographical location, experience, and performance.
• Annual compensation review with more frequent reviews where appropriate for graduates and associates.
• Fully distributed work environment with twice-yearly in-person team sprints.
• USD 2,000 annual personal learning and development budget.
• Recognition and performance rewards.
• Annual holiday leave.
• Maternity and paternity leave.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• Opportunities to travel to new locations and meet colleagues from around the world.
• Priority Pass access and travel upgrades for eligible long-haul company events.
• Opportunity to wo