Senior Software Performance Engineer

Role overview An autonomous vehicle engineering team is hiring a Senior Software Performance Engineer to own the latency, throughput, memory utilization, and thread safety of its real-time behavior planning pipeline. The role partners with staff roboticists who author the autonomy logic, profiling the stack, enforcing performance budgets, and building guardrails that keep execution deterministic. Prior robotics or autonomous vehicle experience is not required; the team is seeking engineers obsessed with low-level systems performance.

Responsibilities - Instrument the behavior pipeline to measure runtime performance, isolating latency spikes, contention, and memory inefficiencies - Refactor high-frequency execution loops to improve cache utilization, eliminate dynamic allocations, and reduce tail latency - Re-engineer thread boundaries and synchronization to maximize multi-core throughput while preserving thread safety - Build automated micro-benchmarks and runtime telemetry into CI/CD pipelines to prevent regressions - Partner with autonomy teams to design performant, low-overhead C++ module interfaces

Requirements - Deep understanding of CPU cache hierarchies, memory alignment, lock-free concurrency, and Linux thread scheduling - Hands-on experience with Linux profiling toolchains such as Perf, Tracy, or eBPF and sanitizers including ASan, TSan, or Valgrind - Strong proficiency in modern C++ (C++17 or C++20), with emphasis on RAII and cache-friendly data layouts - Familiarity with micro-benchmarking frameworks such as Google Benchmark and with regression testing in CI - Experience in performance-critical environments such as game engines, financial trading systems, database runtimes, or operating system kernels - B.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or an equivalent field

Nice to have - Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field - Five or more years of professional experience - Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or high-throughput real-time control systems - Track record of designing and scaling automated CI/CD performance testing infrastructure

Benefits and work setup The role offers a salary range of $160,000-$180,000 USD. Benefits include a comprehensive healthcare suite covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability plans, Health Savings and Flexible Spending accounts, an immediately vested employer retirement match, generous paid parental leave with phased return, a flexible vacation policy plus paid company holidays, and a total wellness program.