Senior Performance Engineer

Job Title: Senior Performance Engineer

COMPANY DESCRIPTION

Gurucul is a global cyber security company that is changing the way organizations protect their most valuable assets, data and information from insider and external threats both on- and in the cloud. Gurucul's real-time Cloud-Native Security Analytics and Operations Platform provides customers with Next Generation SIEM, Open XDR, UEBA, and Identity and Access Analytics in one unified platform. It combines machine learning behaviour profiling with predictive risk-scoring algorithms to predict, prevent, and detect breaches.

Gurucul technology is used by Global 1000 companies and government agency Gurucul is backed by an advisory board comprised of Fortune 500 CISOs, and world-renowned experts in government intelligence and cyber security. Our mission is to help organizations protect their intellectual property, regulated information, and brand reputation, from insider threats and sophisticated external intrusions.es to fight cybercrimes, IP theft, insider threat and account compromise as well as for log aggregation, compliance and risk-based security orchestration and automation for real-time extended detection and response. The company is based in Los Angeles.

Gurucul is backed by an advisory board comprised of Fortune 500 CISOs, and world-renowned experts in government intelligence and cyber security. Our mission is to help organizations protect their intellectual property, regulated information, and brand reputation, from insider threats and sophisticated external intrusions.

Location: Pune

Employment Type: Full-Time

Job 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, you 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.

You 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.

• Analyse and tune key metrics including latency percentiles (P50/P90/P99),

throughput, concurrency, and error rates.

• Validate system behaviour 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

ClickHouse.

• 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.

• Analyse 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 Skills & Qualifications

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, ClickHouse; 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

Soft Skills: Strong analytical thinking; excellent communication; ability to influence without authority; stakeholder management

Good 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, LitmusChaos).

• 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.

Education

• 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.

What You Will Impact

Platform Scalability

Architect performance testing to ensure

the platform scales for enterprise-grade,

high-volume SaaS workloads.

Data Platform Performance

Drive measurable query and pipeline

performance improvements across MySQL,

RDS, Snowflake, and ClickHouse.

API Reliability

Improve API scalability and resilience,

reducing latency and increasing reliability

across all endpoints.

Continuous Testing Culture

Embed performance gates into CI/CD so every

release is validated before it reaches

production.

Why Gurucul

• Work on a next-generation security analytics and threat detection SaaS platform used

by global enterprises.

• Senior IC role with high visibility and direct engineering impact — no bureaucracy, no

layers.

• Opportunity to build and own the performance engineering practice from the ground

up.

• Collaborative engineering culture with strong investment in tooling, learning, and

growth.

• Competitive compensation, flexible work arrangements, and a forward-thinking team.

To apply:

Please send resumes to [Confidential Information] for consideration.