About the Role
We’re looking for a product-minded Senior Performance Engineer to improve how our products interact with large, complex healthcare datasets. This role uses Data Science skills to drive Product Experience outcomes, by iterating to improve the performance of our Data Platform. The work is analytical, and the outcome is practical: a faster, more scalable product. You’ll investigate existing performance problems, anticipate the impact of future product and dataset changes, shipping improvements across the full system—from data architecture and query execution to API request patterns and user experience.
Responsibilities
- Own performance investigations across the product and data stack, moving from slow queries or poor user experiences to measurable root causes and production improvements.
- Design and evaluate data architecture changes.
- Partner with Product, frontend, and backend engineers to adapt product behavior to the characteristics of the underlying data through techniques such as request batching, debouncing, caching, and pagination.
- Develop representative benchmarks for important combinations of filters, datasets, and product workflows.
- Measure query latency, throughput, concurrency, and infrastructure consumption, with particular attention to datastore performance and cost (we use ClickHouse Cloud).
- Evaluate the likely performance impact of upstream dataset changes before they reach production.
- Assess future product requests and recommend technical or product approaches that balance functionality, responsiveness, scalability, and cost.
- Prototype competing solutions, clearly communicate their tradeoffs, and validate the selected approach in production.
- Improve performance instrumentation, monitoring, and regression detection across data-powered product experiences.
- Establish reusable patterns and capabilities as the Data Product platform becomes a supporting layer for additional products and teams.
What You’ll Bring
- 5+ years of experience building and optimizing production data systems, data-intensive applications, or analytical products.
- Advanced SQL skills and strong proficiency with Python or another general-purpose programming language.
- Experience optimizing analytical workloads in column-oriented databases or data warehouses.
- Experience changing how data is organized or stored to improve application performance (e.g., restructuring tables, precomputing results, changing indexes).
- Experience using query plans, profiling, benchmarks, and production telemetry to diagnose performance problems.
- Ability to reason across system boundaries, including databases, APIs, backend services, client request patterns, and product interactions.
- A hypothesis-driven approach to performance work: define the problem, establish a baseline, test alternatives, and quantify the production result.
- Experience with ClickHouse is a plus.
- Experience contributing to data-heavy search, filtering, analytics, or reporting products is highly desirable.