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Job Category
Software Engineering
Job Details
Senior/Lead Performance Engineer, Distributed Database Systems
The Experience
Do you specialize in systems performance? Do you love working with data and automation? Want to be part of something big? Help build the distributed database technology that powers the growth of the Salesforce Platform worldwide.
SalesforceDB is the transactional database behind Salesforce CRM. It runs more than 1.1 trillion transactions per month on thousands of database instances.
The Salesforce Database team is fast-paced and collaborative. We work across all areas of our distributed transactional database technology stack. We are seeking performance engineers to deliver the tools, analysis, and optimizations that take SalesforceDB to new levels of performance and scalability with every release.
Our performance engineers partner closely with database and storage system developers, application performance engineers, infrastructure engineers, and our analytics team. Together, we deliver all the pieces that add up to high performance in production at scale. Your improvements ship across the whole production fleet every release. Some of our work is published at database research conferences such as CIDR. We are a high-performing team with high standards. We value integrity, rigor, and continuous learning.
What You'll Do
• Drive the design and scalability of our database stack with development teams, from research and conception through delivery in production.
• Find optimization opportunities by profiling the database engine and storage service. Help us meet the performance and scale needs of our largest customers and newly onboarded applications.
• Identify the root cause of performance and scalability problems. Then fix them yourself or drive the fix with the owning team.
• Lead benchmarking and modeling that guide hardware selection and capacity planning for the fleet.
• Build the telemetry, dashboards, and analysis that show how the production fleet performs against its targets.
• Own performance qualification of SalesforceDB releases. Build and run the workloads and benchmarks that decide whether a release goes to production.
You May Be a Great Fit If You Have
• A related technical degree, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of performance engineering on systems software, ideally databases, storage, or distributed systems.
• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and memory management.
• Strong coding skills in Java or C/C++.
• Practical experience with load, benchmark, and regression testing, ideally for multi-tenant workloads at scale.
• A track record of root cause analysis for performance and scalability problems in complex distributed systems.
• Strong SQL and performance data analysis skills (CPU, latency, throughput, per-tenant resource use).
• Experience with telemetry, dashboards, and monitoring against performance targets.
• Fluency with Linux, OS internals, and shell/Python scripting.
• Clear communication and collaboration skills across database, storage, infrastructure, application performance, and analytics teams.
• Integrity and a growth mindset: you report what the data shows, seek feedback, and keep learning.
Additional Qualifications That Could Set You Apart
• MS or PhD in databases or distributed systems.
• Deep knowledge of database internals: optimizer, query execution, storage, transactions, and concurrency control.
• SQL query optimization.
• Splunk or similar log analytics for performance monitoring.
• Java and C/C++ profiling, JVM tuning, and heap dump analysis.
• Statistical analysis and experimental design.
At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions.
The typical base salary range for this position is $148,500 - $260,100 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $178,900 - $285,800 annually.
The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.
