Seniior Staff Software Engineer - Performance Engineering

About the Role

Fivetran is building data pipelines to power the modern data stack for thousands of companies.

We are looking for a brilliant and collaborative individual to join our Performance Engineering Team in the Platform Group as a Senior Staff Software Engineer. You will be focusing on developing world-class enterprise capabilities and features in support of our largest and most sophisticated customers. The work we do is both highly visible and critically important to the long term growth and success of Fivetran. You will have an impact across the entire product as we develop our next generation of enterprise, data governance, and solutions engineering offerings.

Your primary responsibility will be to ensure that our product base meets or exceeds performance standards, driving the overall performance of our products. This entails proposing and designing performance-enhancing features and improvements. You will also design and execute performance tests, analyze data to identify performance issues, and resolve these issues proactively. Additionally, you will monitor system performance over time, identify trends, and recommend improvements. Collaboratively with engineers from other teams, you will engage in discussions, debates, and code reviews to refine ideas, designs, and code.

A successful candidate will possess a humble learning attitude, embracing existing realities and approaching challenges from a fundamental perspective. They will contribute fresh perspectives, enabling the team to make optimal design decisions. This candidate will be actively involved in implementation tasks, continuously refining decision-making factors to recalibrate realities and achieve strategic goals.

This is a full-time position based out of our Oakland office. Our hybrid work model offers a blend of remote flexibility and in-person collaboration, including two days in the office each week to connect and build as a team.

Technologies You’ll Use

• Java (JVM, JIT, GC tuning, thread management), JUnit


• Docker and Kubernetes


• AWS, GCP


• Terraform, WireMock, RestAssured


• Bazel, BuildKite

What You’ll Do

• Develop and Debug code to identify and fix performance issues


• Analyze production workloads and system performance metrics to identify performance bottlenecks in our system.


• Build proof of concepts and translate successful ones into solutions to maximize Fivetran product’s performance and efficiency.


• Build and maintain a platform that focuses on improving the performance, resilience and quality of Fivetran products.


• Impact Fivetran business across product verticals through the work you do.


• Develop deep expertise in Fivetran's Product, Infrastructure, and Platform.


• Communicate, coordinate, and align strategy with the engineering team members; make recommendations to improve reliability, performance, best practices, and processes.


• Work with cross-functional teams (Developers, Product, SRE) across the organization.


• Actively engage with fellow engineers in design and code reviews to ensure we deliver performant solutions that improves the product’s efficiency.

Skills We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of hands-on experience building and scaling high-throughput, low-latency distributed backend systems.


• Deep expertise in Java performance engineering, including profiling, tuning, and garbage collection optimization.


• Familiarity with performance testing frameworks, load simulation, and continuous benchmarking.


• Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, and systems design.


• Hands-on experience with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).


• Demonstrated experience influencing technical direction and engineering culture across teams.

Bonus Skills

• Experience in JVM internals, async I/O frameworks (Netty, Vert.x), or reactive systems.


• Familiarity with database performance tuning (Postgres, Snowflake, etc.).


• Contributions to open-source performance tooling or frameworks.

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