Performance Engineer - Source

Performance Engineer - Open Source

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is widely used in breakthrough enterprise initiatives such as public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation and IoT. Our customers include the world’s leading public cloud and silicon providers and industry leaders in many sectors. The company is a pioneer of global distributed collaboration, with 1000+ colleagues in 70+ countries and very few office based roles.

Teams meet two to four times yearly in person, in interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution. The company is founder led, profitable and growing.

We have created a new career path at Canonical for Performance Engineers who bring exceptional clarity to software performance, correctness and efficiency. This role will function as a driver of performance engineering skills, tools, culture and insights to our entire product range, and as part of a central performance engineering team that develops shared tools, dashboarding capabilities, measurement frameworks and analytical capabilities.

We call this career focus “percorr” because the deep insights that enable sophisticated performance measurement and design also enable teams to improve their harnesses and frameworks for correctness. Understanding not only the application but the runtime, compiler, and system down to the CPU gives an engineer the ability to think creatively and with insight.

We have teams in every time zone and can accommodate applications from almost any country.

• Low‑level CPU insights and assembly language – understanding cache, registers, vectorization, memory
• Kernel performance insights – scheduling, context switching, hardware acceleration
• Distributed systems performance insights – tracing, debugging
• Compiler level performance insights – profile guided optimization, inlining, assembler
• Runtime performance insights – Golang, Python, JVM, NodeJS
• Database performance evaluation – plans, indexing, data modelling, tracing, monitoring
• Web browser performance insights – JS, web frameworks, tracing, CSS
• Performance measurement tooling – profiling, eBPF, D‑Trace, flame graphs
• Benchmarks and performance measurement tools – Phoronix Test Suite, others
• Test harnesses and capabilities in C, C++, Rust, Python, Golang, NodeJS, Java Script

• Drive software performance and correctness in a specific project
• Collaborate with colleagues and community around the globe
• Work on shared tools and infrastructure for performance measurement, analysis and reporting
• Teach, train and develop skills in your team for performance culture and design
• Strengthen test capabilities, harnesses and pipelines
• Analyze systems and code to understand performance and scalability
• Solve problems directly or through influence, leadership and skills development
• Review code and technical designs

• Exceptional academic track record from high school and university
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics
• Demonstrable personal initiatives to measure and improve performance, efficiency and correctness in code
• Confidence to respectfully speak up, exchange feedback and share ideas without hesitation
• Track record of going above-and-beyond expectations to achieve outstanding results
• Leadership and commitment to skills development and mentorship
• Passion for technology evidenced by personal projects and initiatives
• The work ethic and confidence to shine alongside motivated colleagues
• Professional written and spoken English with excellent presentation skills
• Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
• Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
• Appreciative of diversity, polite and effective in a multi‑cultural, multi‑national organisation
• Thoughtfulness and self‑motivation
• Result‑oriented, with a personal drive to meet commitments
• Ability to travel internationally twice a year, for company events up to two weeks long

• Distributed work environment with twice‑yearly team…