Senior Performance Engineer

• full_time
• Posted : 4 years ago

**This role is for someone living in Victoria, BC who wants to join our fast-growing engineering team but does not wish to relocate. We are looking to expand the Thinkific team beyond Vancouver, with hopes of making Victoria our first satellite location. Please only apply if you are open to starting as a remote worker from home then transitioning to a local co-working space or permanent office as the Victoria team grows.**

Do you get excited about vastly improving performance in large complex products? Have you helped build a culture of performance and partnered with engineering teams to keep performance top of mind? Do you have a high attention to detail and a keen analytical mind? Does the idea of joining a rapidly growing tech company excite you? If yes, read on!

As a Senior Performance Engineer at Thinkific, you’ll work closely with our Product Ops and Trust teams, Principal Engineers and our CTO to do everything possible to eke out performance optimizations at every layer of our application from the front end to the database. You are an expert at identifying, measuring,  analysing and improving performance bottlenecks. We have a highly engaged company that cares deeply about our customers— we believe building trust with our customers is one of the primary keys to our success and that’s where you come in. The reliability and speed of our product are of paramount importance when it comes to building and maintaining that trust.

In this role, you will:

• Hunt down, benchmark, triage and improve performance bottlenecks within our applications, at whatever layer they might be found
• Perform load tests to validate system performance and stability
• Analyze tests results and work with Engineers to implement solutions
• Perform root cause analysis of performance issues and help to implement corrective actions
• Oversee system performance lifecycle and identify key metrics for performance improvements
• Generate periodic performance reports for management review
• Code review the code of your fellow engineers with a particular mindset towards the performance implications of changes
• Participate in knowledge sharing activities with team members and provide mentorship for your fellow engineers

To be successful in this role, you must:

• Have at least 8 years of experience as a software engineer working in a web setting, with at least  5 years as a  Performance Engineer (or similar role) within a high traffic production environment
• Have at least 5 years of experience working with Ruby on Rails
• Be skilled at performance benchmarking  and optimizing SQL queries
• Be at an expert level of knowledge for Performance Engineering, Test methods,  and tools (JMeter, BlazeMeter, Gatling, Locust, Soasta or similar)
• Demonstrate experience working with Git and source control practices
• Have strong verbal and written communication skills

You might be the person we’re looking for if you:

• Are eager to learn and grow—you’ve likely attended post-secondary education, continue to seek opportunities to level up your skills or have equivalent professional experience in a similar role
• Have experience optimizing PostgreSQL in a production environment
• Are experienced in working within a multi-tenanted application
• Are driven to continually improve by investing time in learning about new technologies  and techniques and/or working on your own projects
• Have been described as “organized and analytical with attention to detail”
• Possess a lot of responsibility and autonomy—no one will be looking over your shoulder to be sure you’ve got it right!
• Read our How we build at Thinkific blog and are excited about how we work, Blue Sky Week and the challenges we are solving for our customers

Bonus points if you:

• Have experience analysing and optimizing performance at the network level
• Are experienced in analysing and optimizing performance at the application server level
• Have worked with GraphQL and/or Golang  in a production setting

About us:

We’re about the results of online learning and the people along the way! Thinkific is a software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses.

Our mission is no less than to revolutionize the way people learn and earn online by giving them the tools they need to turn their expertise into a sustainable business that impacts both them and their audience. We believe in meaningful, innovative work: we're building and expanding an incredible product that empowers course creators around the globe while working collaboratively to learn and succeed together. Together, we’ve served over 40,000 course creators and more than 10 million students, and these numbers are growing each day! 

Why we think you’ll like working with us:

• Read What to Expect when Applying at Thinkific to learn about our hiring process (and how we put candidates first!)

• Be part of a team of incredibly talented, passionate, and driven people focused on building and innovating on a best-in-class learning platform
• Make an impact with your work—each person has an equal opportunity to contribute to our goals and every day, we get to see how Thinkific is empowering both course creators and their students
• Join one of the fastest-growing companies in Vancouver and find opportunities to grow in your own career—offering advancement opportunities for our team members is important to us!
• We are lucky to have team members working remotely with us for over a year, so you’ll walk into an established system where you’re supported to be productive and successful
• We make sure you always feel included and have opportunities to build meaningful relationships with your team, whether that’s trips to Vancouver to solidify those connections, meet and greet with new team members by video, taking a remote-first approach to meetings or ensuring you have lunch provided for our team-wide events!
• Contribute to Thinkific’s award-winning culture—we’re one of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures and a certified Great Place to Work!
• We offer competitive salaries, a comprehensive benefits package including health, dental, and vision coverage, and an Employee and Family Assistance Program to support the wellbeing of you and your family
• Get additional health and wellness support through a lifestyle or health spending account to put your dollars where you need it most
• Enjoy our open vacation policy and flexible work environment, because we know the importance of having a great work-life balance
• Learn and Grow is one of our values and we take it seriously, providing opportunities through lunch and learns, training, workshops, mentorship, and our $1500 education allowance
• Grow your career AND your family at Thinkific—you’ll be taken care of with our parental leave top-ups as you add to your family
• Work with the hardware you’re most comfortable with, and upgrade or replace your system when you need to with our technology bonus
• Help you get the equipment you need to set-up a home office where you can do your best work
• Be confident bringing your whole self to work—we’re proud to be an inclusive company with a diverse team and values grounded in ethics and equality
• Thinkific welcomes all applicants regardless of race, gender, orientation, sexual identity, economic class, ability, disability, age, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, or status. We believe that different perspectives and backgrounds are what make a company flourish and we welcome you!

This is an incredible role for the right candidate. We can’t wait to meet you!

Skills

• education
• git
• graphql