Description
Job Overview
We are seeking a highly skilled Splunk Staff Software Engineer to join our Performance Optimization and Innovation (PerfOpt) team in Krakow, Poland. As a senior performance engineer, you will play a crucial role in improving the Splunk customer experience through deep performance work and setting long-term performance standards.
Your Impact
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will:
- Lead performance work from hypothesis through instrumentation and design to measured customer impact, coordinating across teams as needed.
- Design petabyte-scale components for memory, concurrency, I/O, and tail latency, guiding architecture for scalability and reliability.
- Utilize profiling, flame graphs, lock contention analysis, benchmarks, and CI regression gates to identify and prevent performance issues.
- Instrument production with telemetry, eBPF, and continuous profiling to measure performance in real workloads.
- Compare performance options, quantify costs and risks, and present evidence-based recommendations to partners.
- Develop reusable AI workflows to shorten performance analysis from days to hours.
- Plan performance work, estimate effort, and lead postmortems to identify root causes and prevent regressions.
- Mentor peers and less experienced engineers on the team.
Minimum Qualifications
Technical Depth
- Advanced C++ in production, including memory management, allocators, move semantics, cache-aware structures, and performance trade-offs.
- Deep performance engineering experience with CPU/memory profiling, flamegraph analysis, lock contention resolution, latency optimization in distributed architectures, benchmarking, and performance modeling.
- Architecture and system design skills, with experience in Docker and Kubernetes.
- Strong Python skills for tooling, benchmark harnesses, telemetry pipelines, and performance data analysis.
- Linux performance internals knowledge, including scheduler, memory subsystem, page cache, filesystems, block I/O, and network stack.
- Experience with Git and CI for automating builds, tests, benchmarks, and releases.
Leadership
- Track record of informing technical decisions, quantifying trade-offs, and surfacing risk early.
- Ability to distill sophisticated problems into comparable data points without losing nuance or hiding uncertainty.
- Clear, concise, high-signal communication across audiences.
- AI savviness applied to delivery speed, with daily use of AI coding agents on production work.
- Experience mentoring and growing engineers, coaching junior engineers into ownership, and influencing peers through technical leadership.
Experience
- Bachelor's degree plus 8 years of related experience, master's degree plus 6 years, or PhD plus 3 years.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with search or storage engines and large-scale data platforms.
- Knowledge of Splunk internals.
- Hardware-level work experience with SIMD, NUMA, cache/TLB behavior, PGO/LTO, and compiler optimization.
- Familiarity with Go, Rust, or another systems language alongside C++.
- Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, including storage, networking, and instance performance characteristics.
- Knowledge of Terraform, Puppet, or Ansible for reproducible performance test environments.
What We Offer You
- Performance problems at a scale very few companies have - petabytes of data, real customers, and measurable impact from every millisecond you remove!
- A constant stream of new things to learn, with expansion into new areas, open source projects, and exploration of new technologies.
- Exceptionally versatile and dedicated peers, from engineering to product management to customer support.
- Career growth through technical ownership, leadership opportunities, and coaching.
- A stable work environment with clear ownership and measurable goals.
- Flexible hybrid work model (balanced work-from-home and in-office collaboration)