Performance Engineer

Are you an engineer who loves understanding and improving the performance of systems? We are seeking versatile engineers to work on the performance of Oxide systems wherever suboptimality is to be found: from the depths of hardware, through the operating system kernel and hypervisor and into the guest operating system — and to the highest levels of the application stack.

As an engineer focused on systems performance, you will:

• Work rigorously to understand existing limiters to performance, wherever those limiters may lie.

• Prototype improvements to the system, be they small fixes, larger scale re-writes, or entirely de novo subsystems.

• Work on systems of a variety of ages, spanning from decades-old to entirely new — and everything in between.

• Work on systems primarily written in Rust and C.

• Work with a wide variety of our systems software, including (but not limited to!) our host operating system (Helios), our hypervisor (Propolis), our block storage service (Crucible), our embedded operating system (Hubris), and our control plane (Omicron).

• Work with a variety of hardware as needed to understand and model the performance ramifications of different architectural or component decisions.

• Develop infrastructure and tooling to better understand systems performance.

You will thrive in this role if you:

• Believe that every instruction is sacred, every instruction is great.

• Love to hunt slow, broken code — and replace it with a vastly improved alternative.

• Are deeply analytical and data-intensive.

• Have used whatever tooling at your disposal to understand systems behavior (e.g., DTrace/eBPF, snoop/tcpdump, truss/strace).

• Have implemented your own tools where the right tool didn’t exist (or otherwise needed to be extended).

• Have experience shipping software written in Rust, C, or another systems-oriented language.

Before applying for this role, you should:

• Browse our public Requests for Discussion to get a flavor for how we work

• Listen to Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz to familiarize yourself with the Oxide hiring process.

• Listen to some of our episodes of Oxide and Friends. A few recommendations:

• When Async Attacks! on a particularly pathological performance problem and the tooling we developed to understand it

• Mr. Nagle’s Wild Ride on a timeless performance tale, re-told anew

• Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service on our storage service and our approach to improving its performance

• Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri on how hardware comprises the ultimate limiter of performance — and why different approaches are called for by different problems

Life at Oxide We are very explicit about our values, and they can be seen in daily life at Oxide, for example:

• Our rigor means we enjoy and take pride in the craft of engineering.

• Our urgency means that we are not above the judicious short-cut.

• Our versatility is reflected in our greatest strength: the breadth of our team.

• Our transparency can be seen in our consensus-driven RFD process.

• Our responsibility means that we both lead and follow: we have our own domains, but we also help others on their parts.

• Our curiosity shows in our insatiable desire to learn – and our empathy in our love of teaching others.

• Our humor is a big part of our daily lives: we are inveterate wise-crackers whose video meetings spill into simultaneous text chat.

Apply here