Senior Performance Engineer

Careers / Product, Engineering and Development

Senior Performance Engineer

About Gurucul

Gurucul is a cybersecurity analytics company delivering Next-Gen SIEM, UEBA, Insider Risk Management, and identity/threat detection solutions. We help enterprises reduce noise, detect threats faster, and improve security outcomes using advanced analytics and AI.

Role Summary

Gurucul is looking for a Senior Performance Engineer to own the end-to-end performance engineering practice for our SaaS-based security analytics platform. In this senior individual contributor role, the Senior Performance Engineer will architect and drive performance testing strategy, mentor junior engineers, and serve as the primary subject matter expert for system scalability, reliability, and efficiency across APIs, microservices, data platforms, and backend databases.

The Senior Performance Engineer will partner closely with Engineering, DevOps, and Product teams to embed continuous performance testing into the software delivery lifecycle and ensure our platform can scale for high volume, multi-tenant SaaS workloads.

Key Responsibilities

Performance Testing Strategy & Leadership

  • Own and evolve the enterprise-wide performance testing strategy, standards, and best  practices.
  • Design and execute comprehensive end-to-end performance testing for SaaS applications,  including load, stress, spike, soak, and chaos testing.
  • Define performance SLAs, KPIs, and acceptance criteria in collaboration with Product and  Engineering leadership.
  • Mentor and guide junior performance engineers; conduct design reviews and code reviews  for test frameworks.
  • Produce executive-level performance reports with root cause analysis and actionable  remediation recommendations.

API & Microservices Performance

  • Lead performance testing for RESTful APIs across public and internal microservices.
  • Analyze and tune key metrics including latency percentiles (P50/P90/P99), throughput,  concurrency, and error rates.
  • Validate system behavior under peak and sustained high-concurrency traffic scenarios.
  • Identify and resolve performance anti-patterns in service-to-service communication,  connection pooling, and caching layers.

Database & Data Platform Performance

  • Lead performance analysis and optimization for production database systems including  MySQL, AWS RDS (Aurora / MySQL / PostgreSQL), Snowflake, and Click House.
  • Conduct advanced SQL query profiling, execution plan analysis, and indexing strategy reviews  for OLTP and analytical workloads.
  • Benchmark and optimize database performance under high concurrent workloads and large scale data volumes.
  • Evaluate data access patterns, partitioning strategies, and caching opportunities for  performance gains.
  • Collaborate with data engineers to optimize ETL pipelines and data platform throughput.

System Performance Analysis & Optimization

  • Identify and resolve system-wide bottlenecks across APIs, databases, microservices,  messaging queues, and data pipelines.
  • Conduct capacity planning and scalability assessments to support product growth and SLA  commitments.
  • Analyze application logs, distributed traces, and system telemetry to determine root causes  of degradation.
  • Provide architectural recommendations to engineering teams for long-term performance  improvements.
  • Drive continuous performance improvements through iterative testing and measurement  cycles.

Monitoring, Observability & Incident Response

  • Design and maintain performance dashboards using Prometheus, Grafana, and APM tools  (Datadog / AppDynamics / New Relic).
  • Monitor application, database, and infrastructure metrics during test execution and  production incidents.
  • Define alerting thresholds and SLO dashboards for proactive performance monitoring.
  • Participate in production performance incidents as the SME, leading root cause analysis and  post-mortems.

Automation & CI/CD Integration

  • Architect and build robust, scalable performance testing frameworks from the ground up.
  • Integrate performance gates into CI/CD pipelines to enforce quality thresholds on every  release.
  • Automate test execution, result collection, trend analysis, and regression detection.
  • Champion performance-as-code practices across engineering teams.

Required Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or  a related field.  Equivalent practical experience with a strong demonstrable track record will be considered.
  • Performance Testing: Apache JMeter (expert-level); Gatling / k6 / Locust; load testing frameworks;  API load testing at scale
  • Programming & Scripting: Python (proficient), Java, Bash, SQL; ability to build and maintain test  frameworks
  • Databases & Data Platforms: MySQL (advanced tuning), AWS RDS (Aurora/MySQL/PostgreSQL), Snowflake,  Click House; slow query analysis, execution plans, indexing, partitioning
  • API &  Microservices: RESTful API performance testing; microservices architecture; distributed  systems; service mesh
  • Observability &  APM: Prometheus, Grafana; Datadog / AppDynamics / New Relic; distributed tracing  (Jaeger / Zipkin)
  • Cloud &  Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, RDS, CloudWatch, EKS); Docker; Kubernetes basics
  • CI/CD: Jenkins / GitLab CI / GitHub Actions; integrating performance gates into  pipelines

Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Have)

  • Experience with Kafka, Apache Spark, or large-scale event-driven data processing systems.
  • Knowledge of multi-tenant SaaS architecture and tenant isolation patterns.
  • Familiarity with chaos engineering tools (Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, Litmus Chaos).
  • Experience with query performance optimization for analytical workloads at petabyte scale.
  • Understanding of cloud cost optimization in the context of performance (right-sizing, auto scaling).
  • Prior experience in cybersecurity, SIEM, UEBA, or security analytics platforms.
  • Contributions to open-source performance testing tooling.

Core Competencies

  • Strong analytical thinking
  • Excellent communication
  • Ability to influence without authority
  • Stakeholder management

Location

Pune, India

To apply:

Please send resumes to jobs@gurucul.com for consideration.