Principal Enterprise & Database Competitive Performance Engineer - TX, Home Office, United States
Originally posted 18 September 2026 by the employer — open 1 day.
About the role
This role involves end-to-end performance engineering for enterprise and database workloads, focusing on CPU behavior, memory hierarchy, software tuning, consolidation, and platform economics. You will be the primary workload authority for AMD EPYC versus Intel Xeon, also evaluating Arm platforms in enterprise use cases.
What you'll do
- Define and maintain an enterprise workload taxonomy covering relational databases, Java, analytics, virtualization, and consolidation.
- Develop rigorous methods for throughput, latency, tail latency, scale-up/scale-out behavior, consolidation, and service-level objectives.
- Analyze AMD versus Intel performance, focusing on core configuration, frequency, power behavior, acceleration features, memory capacity, bandwidth, and platform setup.
- Evaluate compiler, JVM, database, kernel, and library tuning for realistic deployment comparisons.
- Use profiling and counters to explain CPU stalls, memory behavior, locks and contention, NUMA placement, storage or network dependencies, and software bottlenecks.
- Maintain configuration manifests, runbooks, and methodology control to ensure reproducible results.
What you'll need
- Extensive hands-on performance engineering experience with enterprise or server applications at scale.
- Experience with relational or distributed databases, Java or JVM performance, analytics engines, virtualization or hypervisors.
- Demonstrated ability to tune full software stacks and distinguish CPU limitations from storage, network, runtime, and configuration artifacts.
- Strong Linux and system-administration skills, including scripting and repeatable environment setup.
- Experience with profiling tools, hardware performance counters, NUMA analysis, and system-level tuning.
- Strong understanding of throughput, latency, scaling, saturation, consolidation, and service-level metrics.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s in Electrical Engineer, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related field.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience with both Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC enterprise platforms.
- Experience with Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SAP, Java application servers, analytics platforms, or major virtualization stacks.
- Knowledge of software licensing and TCO dynamics that interact with CPU performance and consolidation.
- Experience with industry benchmark suites or customer, OEM or ISV performance labs.
- Cross-ISA enterprise workload experience on Arm.
Skills: performance engineering, enterprise workloads, database, CPU behavior, software tuning, Linux
This role has been open 1 day — well below the 55-day median for Systems Software Engineering roles.
Systems Software Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
664
|
Median days open
55 d
|
Median salary
$205k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | AMD | All employers we track in this specialty (664 roles · 72 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 58 | 664 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 389 | 5787 · 143 employers |
| Median days open | 52 d | 55 d (−3 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $205k |
Skills observed across this category: performance engineering, enterprise workloads, database, CPU behavior, software tuning, Linux
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 156 open roles · median 61 d
- NVIDIA · 129 open roles · median 44 d
- AMD (this employer) · 57 open roles · median 52 d
- Broadcom · 25 open roles · median 54 d
- Mobileye · 24 open roles · median 60 d
- Arm Holdings · 20 open roles · median 87 d
How we counted: 664 open Systems Software Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 72 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 20 Sept 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.