Sr. Performance Engineer

What To Expect
The Performance Engineering team delivers a seamless digital experience to Tesla's customers, employees, suppliers, and robots by proactively optimizing systems & applications to handle varying workloads. This team ensures the delivery of highly performant applications with end-to-end automated scalability and load tests with detailed metric analysis. The team is also responsible for code analysis using instrumentation/profiling and other observability toolsets as well as detecting/resolving performance regressions as well as evangelizing best practices to enhance application performance. In this role, you will work on ensuring that applications and systems perform optimally, especially under heavy load or high traffic scenarios. This role involves optimizing performance, identifying bottlenecks, and providing guidance on system architecture and design to maintain optimal performance under varying loads.

What You'll Do

Monitor full-stack system performance, track key metrics such as application response times (p99 latency), throughput (RPS/QPS), error rates, CPU/memory usage, network latency, and storage I/O

Set up real-time alerts for saturation, high latency, or SLO violations

Profile and diagnose bottlenecks, analyze application code paths, database interactions, filesystem behavior, and block-layer I/O to identify root causes (e.g., inefficient queries, excessive synchronous I/O, queue buildup)

Design and execute performance testing, create realistic benchmarks combining application load simulation with storage stress testing (e.g., random read/write, sequential streaming, database-like patterns)

Run regression, stress, endurance, and scalability tests as well as define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and integrate automated performance checks into CI/CD pipelines

Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and incident resolution, investigate production performance degradations, correlate application symptoms with system-level indicators (e.g., high %iowait, hardware contention, configuration issues), produce post-mortems and drive cross-layer fixes

Drive holistic performance optimization, improve application and database efficiency (query tuning, indexing, caching, asynchronous patterns), tune Linux kernel and storage subsystems (I/O scheduler, caching behavior, filesystem mount options, async I/O), optimize hardware and architecture (SSD/NVMe adoption, RAID configuration, multi-queue support, distributed storage tuning), and validate improvements with measurable gains in throughput, latency, and resource efficiency

Promote prevention and automation, embed performance engineering practices into the SDLC (code reviews, shift-left testing, chaos engineering); automate monitoring, alerting, and testing workflows; lead capacity planning and build a performance-aware culture across development, database, infrastructure, and hardware teams

What You'll Bring

5 years of hands-on experience in Linux kernel and storage performance engineering, with strong knowledge of operating system internals, storage subsystems, cloud/container storage, and distributed filesystems

5 years of experience in advanced performance profiling, tracing, benchmarking, and automation across applications, databases, and infrastructure

4 years of proven end-to-end ownership of production performance from detection and root cause analysis through optimization and long-term prevention preferably in high-scale, high-throughput environments (cloud platforms, databases, or HPC systems)

Strong expertise in filesystem and storage optimization, selecting and tuning filesystems (XFS, ext4, Btrfs, ZFS), mount options, caching strategies, and writeback behavior

Excellent analytical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills; proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally with developers, DBAs, infrastructure, and hardware teams in a fast-paced, innovative environment

Benefits
Compensation and Benefits
Along with competitive pay, as a full-time Tesla employee, you are eligible for the following benefits at day 1 of hire:

Medical plans > plan options with $0 payroll deduction

Family-building, fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits

Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans, both have options with a $0 paycheck contribution

Company Paid (Health Savings Accounts) HSA Contribution when enrolled in the High-Deductible medical plan with HSA

Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)

401(k) with employer match, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, and other financial benefits

Company paid Basic Life, AD&D

Short-term and long-term disability insurance (90 day waiting period)

Employee Assistance Program

Sick and Vacation time (Flex time for salary positions, Accrued hours for Hourly positions), and Paid Holidays

Back-up childcare and parenting support resources

Voluntary benefits to include: critical illness, hospital indemnity, accident insurance, theft & legal services, and pet insurance

Weight Loss and Tobacco Cessation Programs

Tesla Babies program

Commuter benefits

Employee discounts and perks program

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