Description
The Performance Optimization and Innovation (PerfOpt) team at Cisco improves the Splunk customer experience through deep performance work. As a Senior Performance Engineer, you will serve as the performance authority for critical issues, roadmap planning, architecture reviews, and customer conversations. Your responsibilities include:
- Leading a performance domain end-to-end, including hypothesis, instrumentation, design, and measured customer-visible gain in production
- Architecting for scale, designing and re-architecting subsystems in a distributed, petabyte-scale system
- Being responsible for the performance methodology, including profiling and flame graph practice, lock contention analysis, and benchmarking
- Introducing observability, designing new telemetry sources and bringing eBPF and continuous profiling into production use
- Enabling leadership decisions, explaining the problem costs, options, and risks to Directors and Managers
- Delivering fast and making everyone faster, working agentically and building reusable AI agentic workflows and tooling
- Leading and mentoring senior and staff engineers
The ideal candidate will have:
- Expert-level C++ in production systems, including memory management and allocators, move semantics, and cache-friendly data structures
- Deep performance engineering experience, including CPU/memory profiling, flame-graph analysis, lock contention resolution, and latency optimization in distributed architectures
- Strong Python skills for tooling, benchmark harnesses, telemetry pipelines, and performance data analysis
- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes, Linux performance internals, and Git and CI for automating builds, tests, benchmarks, and releases
- A track record of informing leadership decisions, distilling complex problems into comparable data points, and clear, concise communication across audiences
- Experience with AI savviness applied to delivery speed, leading, mentoring, and growing engineers
The role offers:
- Performance problems at a scale few companies have, with petabytes of data and measurable impact from every millisecond removed
- A constant stream of new things to learn, with expansion into new areas, open source projects, and new technologies
- Exceptionally versatile and dedicated peers, career growth through technical ownership, leadership opportunities, and coaching
- A stable work environment with clear ownership and measurable goals, flexible hybrid work model, and benefits including flexible hybrid work, growth and mentorship opportunities, and a collaborative, supportive team