Performance Engineer, Wave

• 7+ years of experience in performance engineering, SRE, or systems optimisation
• Deep proficiency in Python performance analysis and optimisation
• Deep understanding of Postgres performance, SQL optimisation, indexing, and query execution
• Experience with GraphQL performance
• Experience building internal performance tooling or platforms that other engineers use
• Track record of measurable performance improvements (reduced latency, lower costs, improved throughput)
• Demonstrated expertise in performance testing, load testing, profiling, and optimisation of backend services and databases
• Strong programming skills in more than one programming language (Python preferred as one of them)
• Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and caching strategies
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. This role will succeed by enabling product engineers to create more performant code

Desirable

• As Wave's first Performance Engineer, you will establish performance engineering across our Python monolith, GraphQL API, Postgres and CockroachDB databases, and cloud infrastructure. You will tackle challenges related to optimising system performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency for systems serving tens of millions of users across multiple countries
• You’ll work within the Platform group and report to the Director of Platform. And you will lay the foundation of performance engineering at Wave by building tooling, processes, and best practices used by all of Wave's engineers, with the potential to grow this into a dedicated team, offering a chance to shape our technical future
• Design, build, and operate Wave’s performance engineering function from the ground up, defining strategy, tooling, and processes for performance testing and optimisation
• Profile and analyse production performance, using observability and debugging tools to identify bottlenecks across application code, database queries, caching, networking, and infrastructure
• Partner with and mentor backend developers and database engineers to design and roll out performance improvements, including code optimisations, query tuning, caching strategies, and architecture changes
• Improve our observability stack for performance signals by creating metrics, traces, profiling, and alerting to help teams understand system behaviour under load
• Develop and maintain load, stress, and scalability testing frameworks to evaluate the performance of our backend monolith, GraphQL APIs, and Postgres/CockroachDB-backed workloads
• Examples of challenges you may work on:
• Ensuring our monolith and database can safely support the expected user growth (4x in the next 3 years)
• Building internal tooling for self-service and automated load testing of critical API and database code paths
• Using profiling and observability to reduce the latency of key GraphQL queries and make the tooling readily available to all engineers
• Identifying performance regressions early and making them visible across engineering
• Creating performance guidelines and training materials for backend engineers
• Create automated performance testing in CI/CD to ensure every significant change is evaluated for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency

• Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role
• We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals