Senior Performance Engineer, Data Products

Responsibilities

• Own performance investigations across the product and data stack, moving from slow queries or poor user experiences to measurable root causes and production improvements.
• Design and evaluate data architecture changes.
• Partner with Product, frontend, and backend engineers to adapt product behavior to the characteristics of the underlying data through techniques such as request batching, debouncing, caching, pagination.
• Develop representative benchmarks for important combinations of filters, datasets, and product workflows.
• Measure query latency, throughput, concurrency, and infrastructure consumption, with particular attention to datastore performance and cost (we use ClickHouse Cloud).
• Evaluate the likely performance impact of upstream dataset changes before they reach production.
• Assess future product requests and recommend technical or product approaches that balance functionality, responsiveness, scalability, and cost.
• Prototype competing solutions, clearly communicate their tradeoffs, and validate the selected approach in production.
• Improve performance instrumentation, monitoring, and regression detection across data-powered product experiences.
• Establish reusable patterns and capabilities as the Data Product platform becomes a supporting layer for additional products and teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and optimizing production data systems, data-intensive applications, or analytical products.
• Advanced SQL skills and strong proficiency with Python or another general-purpose programming language.
• Experience optimizing analytical workloads in column-oriented databases or data warehouses.
• Experience changing how data is organized or stored to improve application performance (e.g., restructuring tables, precomputing results, changing indexes, or optimizing how data is queried).
• Experience using query plans, profiling, benchmarks, and production telemetry to diagnose performance problems.
• Ability to reason across system boundaries, including databases, APIs, backend services, client request patterns, and product interactions.
• A hypothesis-driven approach to performance work: define the problem, establish a baseline, test alternatives, and quantify the production result.
• A mindset of connecting technical work to user or business outcomes.
• Your own product judgment, the ability to identify cases where changing the product experience is more effective than changing the underlying data system.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with ClickHouse.
• Experience contributing to data-heavy search, filtering, analytics, or reporting products.
• Experience with healthcare specific data types: claims, contract rates, revenue cycle, medical billing, or healthcare pricing experience.