Senior Software Performance Engineer

Job Summary

As a Senior Performance Engineer on the Behavior Planning team, you will own latency, throughput, memory utilization, and thread safety for our real-time decision-making pipeline. Working alongside staff roboticists who write high-level autonomy logic, your job is to profile the stack, enforce performance budgets, and build execution guardrails that guarantee deterministic, high-throughput execution.

Prior background in autonomous vehicles, controls, or robotics math is not required. We are seeking engineers obsessed with system performance, low-level execution concepts, and software profiling tools.

Essential Responsibilities

• System Diagnostics: Instrument the behavior pipeline to measure runtime performance, isolating latency spikes, resource contention, and memory inefficiencies.
• Pipeline Optimization: Refactor high-frequency execution loops to maximize cache utilization, eliminate dynamic memory allocations, and reduce tail latency.
• Concurrency Architecture: Re-engineer thread boundaries and synchronization logic to maximize multi-core parallel processing while ensuring thread safety.
• Performance Guardrails: Build automated micro-benchmarks and runtime telemetry into CI/CD pipelines to prevent algorithm developers from introducing performance regressions.
• API Design: Partner with autonomy teams to establish performant, low-overhead C++ module interfaces for new behavioral features.

Required Qualifications

• Systems & Hardware Knowledge: Deep understanding of CPU cache hierarchies (L1/L2/L3), memory alignment, lock-free concurrency models, and Linux OS thread scheduling.
• Profiling & Diagnostic Tooling: Hands-on experience with Linux profiling toolchains (e.g., Perf, Tracy, eBPF) and dynamic sanitizers (ASan, TSan, Valgrind).
• C++ Engineering: Strong proficiency in modern C++ (C++17/20) with a focus on writing low-overhead abstractions, RAII, and cache-friendly data layouts.
• Benchmarking Methodologies: Familiarity with micro-benchmarking frameworks (e.g., Google Benchmark) and performance-regression testing in continuous integration.
• Domain Background: Experience in performance-critical software environments such as game engines, financial technology, database runtimes, or operating system kernels.
• Degree Requirement: B.S. Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or an equivalent degree.

Desirable Qualifications

• Academic Advancement: Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Professional Depth: At least 5 years of professional experience.
• Domain Expertise: Prior experience in AV, robotics, or high-throughput real-time control systems.
• Advanced Process Ownership: Proven track record of designing and scaling automated CI/CD performance testing infrastructure.

Benefits and Perks

• Comprehensive healthcare suite including medical, dental, vision, life, and disability plans. Domestic partners who have been residing together at least one year are also eligible to participate.
• Health Savings and Flexible Spending Healthcare and Dependent Care Accounts available.
• Rich retirement benefits, including an immediately vested employer safe harbor match.
• Generous paid parental leave as well as a phased return to work.
• Flexible vacation policy in addition to paid company holidays.
• Total Wellness Program providing numerous resources for overall wellbeing