Performance Engineer -- Non Functional QE

Business Area:

Seniority Level:

Job Description: 

At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry.  Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.

At Cloudera, our Data Services Pillar is the heart of data innovation. We don’t just work with technology; we build it. Our mission is to empower data practitioners by creating seamless, enterprise-grade experiences for data engineering, warehousing, streaming, operational databases, and AI.

You will be a key member of the NFQE (Non Functional QE) team that drives the performance reliability of Cloudera’s Kubernetes‑hosted data services. The role blends deep technical knowledge of performance testing, distributed data workloads, and container orchestration with a data‑driven mindset. You’ll design, automate, run, and analyze performance tests for Cloudera’s flagship services, ensuring they meet or exceed customer‑defined SLOs/SLAs at scales.

As a Performance Engineer, you will:

• Work with internal development teams and the open source community to proactively drive performance improvements/optimizations across our data warehouse and Data Engineering stack.

• Work with product managers, developers and the field team to understand performance and scale requirements, and develop benchmarks based on these requirements.

• Develop automation to execute benchmarks, collect and aggregate metrics and profiles, and report results, trends, and regressions.

• Analyze performance and scalability characteristics to identify bottlenecks in large-scale distributed systems.

• Perform root cause analysis of performance issues identified by internal testing and from customers and suggest corrective actions.

• Evaluate performance of systems and provide related guidance to the team.

We are excited about you if you have:

• 3 + years of industry experience in performance-related work, ideally on large-scale distributed systems

• Understanding of DBMS algorithms and data structure fundamentals.

• Understanding of hardware trends and full-stack systems performance: CPU, RAM, storage, network, Linux kernel, JVM, and distributed systems performance.

• Understanding of performance analysis tools and techniques.

• Strong design, coding skills, and test automation skills (Java/C++/Golang/Python preferred)

• Knowledge of relevant frameworks, cloud provider knowledge, K8s, etc.   

• Ability to work in a distributed setting with team members spread in multiple geographies

• Demonstrated ability to work on large cross-functional projects, including strong written communication skills and a collaborative mindset, as you will be working with many teams inside and outside of Cloudera.

• Experience with benchmark and performance test design.  You eshould understand basic concepts of performance testing including different types of performance tests (microbenchmarks, end-to-end benchmarks, concurrency and scale testing), how to reduce (or deal with) noise in test results, etc.  

• Experience designing performance tests that provide useful insights into specific aspects of performance. 

• Solid understanding of basic performance theory - in particular a very good understanding of latency, throughput, and concurrency and how they relate to each other.

• Strong understanding of the types of workloads they'll be testing Ideally they should have specific experience creating performance tests for the specific product area they'll be working on (SQL, ML, etc).

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

You might also have:

• Experience with the Hadoop ecosystem (i.e. Hive, Impala, Spark), in specific  Prior work on large‑scale data lakehouse or data‑warehouse performance

• Hands-on experience with containerization, Kubernetes, public cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure and/or GCP) and mesh-networks

• Certifications: CKA/CKAD, AWS Solutions Architect, GCP Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, or equivalent.

• Security & Compliance: Experience writing performance tests that also verify data‑privacy and audit compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).

Why this role matters:

This is your opportunity to build cloud-native solutions that are deployable anywhere whether in massive clusters on any cloud provider or in private data centers. You’ll work with cutting-edge technologies like Trino, Spark, Airflow, and advanced AI inferencing systems to shape the future of analytics. Your code will directly influence how data engineers, analysts, and developers worldwide find value in their data.

We believe in the power of open source. You’ll collaborate with project committers, contributing upstream to keep technologies like Apache Hive and Impala evolving. You’ll harden these engines for rock-solid security, optimize them for peak performance, and make them effortlessly run across all environments.  Join us and help build the trusted, cloud-native platform that powers insights for the most data-intensive companies on the planet.

This position is not eligible for sponsorship.

The expected base salary range for this role in:

• California is $124,000 - $155,000  

The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location.

What you can expect from us:

• Generous PTO Policy 

• Support work life balance with Unplugged Days

• Flexible WFH Policy 

• Mental & Physical Wellness programs 

• Phone and Internet Reimbursement program 

• Access to Continued Career Development 

• Comprehensive Benefits and Competitive Packages 

• Paid Volunteer Time

• Employee Resource Groups

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