Senior Staff Software Engineer - Performance Engineering

From Fivetran’s founding until now, our mission has remained the same: to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity. With Fivetran, customer data arrives in their warehouses, canonical and ready to query, with no engineering or maintenance required. We’re proud that more organizations continue to leverage our technology every day to become truly data-driven.

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.

#LI-HYBRID #LI-EM1

The compensation range displayed on this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire compensation for the target position and level, and may include sales incentives or target bonuses depending on the role. Our compensation ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Our job titles may span more than one career level. Within the range, individual compensation is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, relevant education or training, business need, market demands. The compensation range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. Your recruiter can share more about the specific compensation range for your location during the hiring process.

Oakland Pay Range$225,570.39—$281,962.99 USD

Perks and Benefits

• 100% employer-paid medical insurance*
• Generous paid time-off policy (PTO), plus paid sick time, inclusive parental leave policy, holidays, and volunteer days off
• RSU stock grants*
• Professional development and training opportunities
• Company virtual happy hours, free food, and fun team-building activities
• Monthly cell phone stipend
• Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources in areas such as: therapy, coaching, and self-guided mindfulness exercises for all covered employees and their covered dependents.

*May vary by country and worker type - please reach out to your recruiter for more information

Click to learn more about Fivetran's Benefits by Region.

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Fivetran brings together high-quality talent across the globe to make data access as easy and reliable as electricity for our customers. We value and recognize that our customers benefit from having innovative teams made of people from many backgrounds, experiences, and identities. Fivetran promotes diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging through attracting, recruiting, developing, and retaining a diverse workforce, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it helps us build a world-class company to better serve our customers, our people and our communities.