Sr. Principal Performance Engineer (Database & AI Benchmarking)

A Little About Us

EDB provides a data and AI platform that enables organizations to harness the full power of Postgres for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads across any cloud, anywhere. EDB empowers enterprises to control risk, manage costs and scale efficiently for a data and AI led world. Serving more than 1,500 customers globally and as the leading contributor to the vibrant and fast-growing PostgreSQL community, EDB supports major government organizations, financial services, media and information technology companies. EDB’s data-driven solutions enable customers to modernize legacy systems and break data silos while leveraging enterprise-grade open source technologies. EDB delivers the confidence of up to 99.999% high availability with mission critical capabilities built in such as security, compliance controls, and observability. For more information, visit www.enterprisedb.com

Candidate Note: This position is 100% remote for candidates based in EU/UK

We are hiring a Principal Performance Engineer to make performance a core company competency across our database and AI workloads. You will set the performance engineering strategy—defining benchmarks, realistic workloads, regression detection and gating, and clear executive-ready reporting—and partner with Engineering, Solutions Verification, and Product to ensure we deliver predictable performance at scale. You will influence product direction by identifying systemic bottlenecks, shaping architectural and roadmap decisions, and leading cross-team initiatives 

What you will be doing:

• Benchmark design & execution: Build and maintain repeatable end-to-end benchmarks for database and AI workloads
• Database performance engineering: Evaluate throughput, latency, concurrency, scalability, and stability across OLTP/OLAP and mixed workloads.
• AI performance benchmarking: Measure and optimize performance for GPU/CPU inference pipelines, model serving, and data/feature pipelines; assess cost/performance tradeoffs.
• Tooling & automation: Develop harnesses, scripts, dashboards, and reproducible environments to run benchmarks consistently.
• Analysis & reporting: Produce clear reports, identify bottlenecks, and recommend fixes.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with database engineers, AI engineers, the field teams and product management to define performance goals and acceptance criteria.
• Performance best practices: Establish standards for test hygiene, statistical rigor, hardware normalization, and benchmark governance.

What you will bring:

• 8+ years in performance engineering, benchmarking, SRE, or systems engineering (database and/or AI systems).
• Strong understanding of performance concepts and stochastic modeling: latency percentiles, tail behavior, throughput, concurrency, queueing, saturation, and capacity planning.
• Strong understanding of database internals (Postgres or equivalent databases).
• Hands-on experience benchmarking databases and/or distributed systems (e.g., Postgres or similar).
• Experience with benchmarking tools and harnesses (examples: pgbench, HammerDB, TPC-like workloads, custom harnesses).
• Proficient in Python and/or Go for automation and data analysis, strong scripting skills (Bash), skills in eBPF.
• Experience with Linux performance profiling (e.g., perf, flamegraphs, strace, iostat, vmstat).
• Ability to communicate findings clearly and drive performance improvements with engineering teams.

What will give you an edge:

• Experience with active benchmarking techniques.
• Experience with vector databases / vector search benchmarking (recall/latency tradeoffs, indexing, tuning).
• PostgreSQL performance tuning (autovacuum, WAL, replication, connection scaling).
• RAG pipelines: ingestion + embeddings + vector retrieval + reranking + generation.
• Familiarity with AI stack components: model serving, GPU profiling
• Background in storage and networking performance (IO patterns, filesystem tuning, kernel tuning).

EDB is committed to supporting our employees' overall well being by offering a range of benefits and resources to promote a healthy work-life balance and wellness. We provide access to CuraLinc to aid employees in health and wellness tips and practices, as well as Wellness Fridays extending to December 2026! Check out our career site for more information on perks and benefits and reach out to our Talent Acquisition team for region specific benefits.

We know it takes a unique mix of people and skills to help us in our mission to supercharge Postgres, and we understand that not everyone will check every box. We’d love to hear from you and we want you to apply!

EDB is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. EDB was built on a commitment to trust and respect each other and to embrace an array of people and ideas. These values remain at the center of our culture and are key to our company’s integrity. 

EDB does not seek or accept unsolicited resumes or CVs from recruitment agencies. EDB and its affiliates are not responsible for, and will not pay, any fees, commissions, or any other similar payment related to unsolicited resumes or CVs except as required in a written signed agreement between EDB and the recruitment agency or party requesting payment of a fee.

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