Summary:

EdX is looking for a Performance Engineer to join our growing organization. This position is an ideal opportunity for a smart, energetic individual who specializes in web application performance to have a significant impact on educating millions of students. This individual will help ensure that our Open Source learning platform is performant and scalable, and provide tools and guidance for developers to do so on their own features.

Responsibilities:

• Establish best practices for performance evaluation across the organization
• Support software engineers in adopting page performance profiling techniques
• Work with teams to understand performance liabilities via metrics and reporting, and contribute advice and/or code for implementing improvements
• Maintain and improve server side load testing infrastructure and tooling for use by engineers.
• Incorporate performance evaluation into our continuous integration process, including both backend and front-end metrics
• When needed, work with DevOps to triage and troubleshoot performance issues in production

Qualifications & Skills:

• Real-world experience writing Python or other dynamic development languages
• Understanding of common database bottlenecks and performance anti-patterns
• Experience working in a fast-paced Agile/Scrum development shop
• Commitment to documentation best practices so your code can be consumed in an open source environment

Preferred:

• Understanding of poor performance mitigation techniques (e.g., caching, query optimizations, indexing, deferred computation, etc)
• Full stack performance engineering capabilities, ranging from instrumenting front-ends (e.g., JavaScript) to optimizing back-ends.
• Working knowledge of common relational and schemaless data stores such as MySQL and MongoDB.
• Previous experience working with load generation tools such as Locust, JMeter, and wrk. (We use Locust here at edX.)
• Previous experience with performance monitoring tools such as New Relic, Tracelytics/TraceView, and DynaTrace. (We use New Relic.)
• Demonstrated ability to pinpoint performance risks by interpreting output (e.g., waterfall charts, network latency graphs, stack trace profiles)
• Experience with continuous integration systems (e.g., Jenkins, TravisCI) and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef)
• Contributor to or consumer of Open Source projects
• Demonstrated understanding of the HTTP protocol, web applications, Unix, Bash shell scripting
• Understanding of content delivery on a global scale, its challenges and how to solve them

Applicants must be able to work out of our Cambridge, MA office. Sorry, Visa sponsorship is not available.