Software Engineer - Performance PhD Candidates

P-187

At Databricks, we are passionate about helping data teams solve the world's toughest problems. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business. Databricks develops and operates one of the largest scale software platforms; the fleet consists of millions of virtual machines, generating terabytes of logs and processing exabytes of data per day. At our scale, we observe cloud hardware, network, and operating system faults, and our software must gracefully shield our customers from any of the above.

As a performance engineer, you will work with multiple teams across the company to evaluate the performance of products and features, identify performance bottlenecks, and partner with engineers to solve performance and scalability issues. This implies, among other teams, setting performance targets for software releases, guiding teams to develop performance benchmarks, running competitive benchmark analysis for different Databricks products, doing deep dive analysis to identify performance issues and fix them. You will report directly to the Director of Engineering and have the opportunity to work with a strong team of engineers. 

The impact you will have:

• You will identify performance limitations of the entire stack based on telemetry, customer signals, POCs, and benchmarks to result in the best performing system across the industry, when resolved. Impact spans all cloud providers and all major areas.
• You will set the performance expectations for all cross-cutting efforts early on through specialized benchmarks capturing the intended customer user journeys, and make sure they are met before deployed to customers.
• You will understand the performance characteristics of the compute instance types, storage layers, and all cloud services Databricks depends on and deploy solutions to meet the customer demand.
• You will work with customers to root cause and reduce performance problems during production, previews, and POCs.

What We Look For:

• PhD in databases or systems
• Knowledge of database systems, storage systems, distributed systems, and performance optimization
• Motivated by delivering customer value and influence