Senior Performance Engineer

Posit creates great software that helps people understand data and make better decisions. Our core offering is an open source data science toolchain.  As a Public Benefit Corporation, we aim to make it available to everyone, regardless of their economic means.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced performance and scalability engineer to create a central scalability function for our professional products. You will focus first on measuring our current performance profile across the product suite to identify areas for improvement, and then on coaching developers and QA engineers in best practices for finding and mitigating issues that impact software performance. This position has the potential to have a significant impact on our development practices and growth as a company, as we expand into new markets with increasingly usage-heavy profiles. Posit produces a family of cloud-based and on-premise software products for data science, scientific research, and technical communication, so your work has the potential to improve the user experience of scientists around the world.

What you’ll own:

• create a consistent scalability strategy across all products, setting performance and scalability targets and ensuring the product teams are achieving them
• establish baseline metrics for our products’ performance and load characteristics, as a starting point for scalability improvements
• create the infrastructure for performance and load testing that can be shared and easily extended by other engineers
• provide visibility (e.g., dashboards) into current performance metrics, and performance trends, to both the product teams and leadership
• mentor developers and QA engineers on scalability and performance topics
• cultivate a performance mindset among the product teams, as supported by leadership across product groups and functions

What you’ll collaborate on:

• identify areas in our products where performance can be improved based on the architecture and execution paths
• work with product teams to help them build performance testing into the CI process to provide ongoing visibility into progress in the development and release processes
• giving and receiving feedback from other engineers in the form of code and design reviews
• advocating for our customers and users from a performance perspective

What you’ll learn:

• the Posit products and how their data science customers use them
• any languages and technology we use, for the portions you don't know already
• practical data science using R and Python (don’t worry; you don’t need that when you start)

What you’ll teach:

• best practices for scalability-optimized software development and testing
• methods of writing performance and load tests in a clean, modular and extensible framework

About you

You have a deep interest in continuously improving software scalability. You are comfortable coding automated performance tests, analyzing outcomes, and understanding system architectures for the purposes of test environment creation and problem identification. You are skilled at working closely with development teams to identify areas for improvement and offer recommendations for the most effective solution. You have at least 5 years of experience in a performance engineering role, and you know how to reveal the systems’ real limitations.

You are user-focused and driven by our mission to facilitate science and education for everyone. You excel at breaking down complex problems into bite-size tasks and driving them to completion. You love to learn and help others succeed through code review and other forms of mentorship. You are humble, pragmatic, deliberate, and you have a keen sense of empathy for your co-workers and users. 

About us

• We welcome all talented colleagues and are committed to a culture that represents diversity in all its forms.
• We prioritize giving ourselves “focus time” to get deep work done. We minimize meetings and attempt to operate asynchronously.
• We are a learning organization and take mentorship and career growth seriously. We hope to learn from you and we anticipate that you will also deepen your skills, influence, and leadership as a result of working at Posit.
• We operate under a unique sustainable business model: We have over 50% of our engineering dedicated to creating free and open source software.  We are profitable and we plan to be around decades from now.

Notable:

We offer competitive compensation with extensive human-first, people-focused benefits to prioritize your personal and financial well-being.

• 100% of medical, dental, and vision insurance premiums are covered for employees and their families! Fertility and gender-affirming healthcare is included in all of our plans.
• Supplemental mental health and wellness benefits are available via Ginger even if you don’t opt in to our insurance plans, including Ginger for teen family members.
• Posit's gender-neutral paid parental leave policy covers all new parents, including foster and adoptive parents.
• Our 401k matches up to 50% of the maximum employee contribution after six months.
• An annual profit-sharing bonus for employees recognizes our team’s contributions to company performance across the year.
• We are a 100% distributed team. You are also welcome to come into our Seattle or Boston offices. 
• Our remote office allowance includes: 
• $1000 home office allowance plus an additional $800 for equipment
• Up to $400 monthly reimbursement for coworking space rental
• We provide a flexible environment with a generous vacation policy that encourages a minimum of four weeks PTO per year plus 13 paid company holidays.

Posit is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage applicants of different backgrounds, cultures, genders, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical disability, or length of time spent unemployed.

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